A US Patent can not be ever open-sourced. In legal and logical terms, those are on the pretty much opposite sides of the spectrum.

The closest that comes to mind is "Free Nestlé bottled water".

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pas 2 days ago | parent [-]

why? the usual OSI licenses all work through copyright, and through conditional granting of rights (hence the name license)

for a parent granting irrevocable royalty-free usage rights to anyone is equivalent to putting it into the public domain, no?

both copyright and a patent grants exclusive rights to the rightsholder (right to perform, modify, or in case of patents to use the invention in the way covered by one of the claims), and the rightsholder is free to include more persons in the group of authorized users (ie. extend the rights to others, and can do so conditionally - hence the Apache2 patent grant)

can you please explain where my understanding is incorrect or missing something? thanks!

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Fischgericht 2 days ago | parent [-]

For example there a lot of ways to use the so-called priority of the US patent to file other patents, including elsewhere in the world.

US Americans sadly often forget that the majority of the planet is not the USA. Here in Thailand, US and EU pharma companies have managed to get patents on 15 year old basic stuff like anti-histaminic meds. "Oh, but the system of limited monopoly in the US worked for us?". Yeah. But in Europe, the cost per pill is somewhere around $0.08. In Europe it's about $0.02. In Thailand it's $0.80 because Zyrtec managed to file a patent here re-using the priority of the US patent. And wage-adjusted in Thailand the cost per pill is about $15 per pill. You better don't have an allergy over here. So: Patents can have long-term consequences.

Back to IT: Have a look at the whole patent troll industry. The biggest chunk of junk patents that they bought are coming from "we will not do any harm" owners/filers. A lot can happen in 20 years.

	▲	pas 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, I completely support your righteous anger against the tragicomedy of US "IP colonisation", though note that it has not much to do with my comment about the possibility of an open source patent. The fact that most of the world was just laying down belly up to accept the negative consequences of the ridiculous cottage industry of churning out patents "for later" is truly enraging if someone gets to see how little value it produces. (It's very convenient for large conglomerates, VC fueled startups, and ... that's it.) When it comes to specifics, ie. with pharma, it's hard to really disentangle the mess from other ugly facts, like the post-WWII global economy which and the very misregulated US healthcare industry (R&D including). The US is subsidizing R&D for the world, because the other rich countries have sane "collective bargaining", but this leaves the small not so rich markets out in the fucking cold, because they have a weak bargaining position (market access doesn't worth that much to pharma companies) and also usually no internal R&D (so no local companies filing for these trivial parents). But because of all this in effect the world is buying R&D at the worst price! (Though of course the picture is more complicated than this, but R&D is definitely waaay too inefficient in the US, but also all over the world too.)