Saturday, February 5, 2011

Prior Art Initiative

Well. I was working on a program and is, again, considering the value of my solution. At this moment it takes me about 10 hours to come-up with something I think is workable. I intended to some amount of time in programming to implement that idea.

Aware of my earlier advocates[1] on urging people to public posting their crazy idea as a counter measure in defeating some of the crazy software patents, I am ready to write up a blog on Prior Art Initiative. Just then, I googled the web and found that there is Prior Art Initiative at here. Unfortunately, following their FAQ, it seems there isn't a definite mechanism in place yet.

At this moment, I will continue as follow:
1. I will create IDs with a form similar to: PA GUID.
- So that it is easier to refer to the prior art.
2. I will document the idea behind the code.
- This is intended to give some idea on the limit of the idea.
3. I will document the efforts in terms of work hours.
- This is intended to provide some effort-measures information that can , hopefully, used to gauge the value of some of today's software patents.
4. I will setup terms that should be followed when implement the idea.
- This is mimic to the general open source terms that given credits to the creator.

I will monitor the progress of the "Open Source as Prior Art" movement and adjust my terms accordingly.

[1] My first attempt on this is an email to Richard Stallman. In his response, he talked about the criteria of a prior art and is not very postive on what can be done with just an idea. My latest attempt is my comment on an article, possibly, related to Apple - I hope I can find those references. But I am not going to make a big deal out of it.