this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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At the very least, all design and code should be held in escrow, to be released immediately if the company stops maintaining it.
In theory, that's part of what a patent is supposed to do: the design is filed with the patent office, and after the course of the patent has run out, other companies have the design and the legal right to make competing products. I kind of wonder if making software patentable could help the open source movement.
Software patents are very common and no, this has not helped the open source movement.
In the US at least, code itself cannot be patented. A means of accomplishing something with software can, but not the code itself. This means that all the patent office receives is a diagram of what the software is supposed to do, rather than its source code. Having the source code publicly-available could help the open-source movement.