"Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com> schrieb:
Good grief. The patent system is out of control.
Actually, since the original captcha idea is in fact clever, and since
I'm not a totally anti-patent person, I could it being reasonable to
reward the inventors of the idea with a 2 year patent. 17 years is an
infinity.
I wonder if there are things that we've developed in house here at
Wikimedia that we should patent, just to license our patents freely
of course, and also to make fun of the patent system.
Problem is that patents cost money and time to issue. On the other hand,
if we find a way to issue it in some way that it is "free, provided you
don't stand on our mat with your patents either", it might be useful.
Now, I don't know the inner workings of the Wikipedia software well
enough to know what might be patented there, but on the outside:
* best to patent, but most likely to fall short on being the first would
of course be the combination of wiki-like technology with databases.
Something like using a database to enable users to change webpages and
storing them in a simplified format that can be worked into HTML.
* namespaces. Having webpages in a database with both a title and an
identifier giving various kinds of pages. Could be patented as a way
of allowing users to make comments on webpages (on a separate page)
* reverting. Having an interface to show changes to webpages and restore
them easily to an older version
There's probably more, but it's past 4 am here...
Andre Engels