I’m examining the subtle differences in cost and time of ownership for preventing the exercise of a proprietary invention as life of author + 50 years for an exact copy and patent filing and prosecution lasting 20 years for a similar invention in novelty. I’m trying to find out if an open source version of a patented software is a riot art or infringement. Columbia prof says encroachment into proof it’s while gnu public licensees may contend alternative open source versions common and non-novel. There is a questionable issue about prior art. Kongfinger was originally invented by me and published in 2001 linking employee names to search engine keywords. My current method uses a regex email formula instead of name pattern matching. Copyright: $30-60, Patent filing: $50k-$100k. I like open source combined with copyright or patent, non-exclusive publicly available software rights are a really good way to market and test research software in the open source community. A valid patent could be useful for a commercially established product venture. I generally prefer proprietary license for corporate purposes because of the extensive warranty and liability jurisprudence in the UCC. There is generally a versioning conundrum in open source that is not addressed by the uspto because hypothetically a plagiarist could “patent” an open source software without the original author(s) consensual knowledge while I think an open source should not be prior art. While the multi-year patent application process is out dated for international open source software standards scales of economy could be a factor for widely established software business practices because Uber is not patented, there is Lyft and generally the vertical liability. A business process is more apt candidate for a software patent that includes a technological business->materials->people component. The main matter is whether a copyright of a software solution or publication as open source suffices as prior art for future business patent purposes. While the most similar patent is from IBM, a big business industrial tech giant impossible to compete with, there are no patents like kongfinger:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10496683B2/en?q=Expert+locator+text+indexing&oq=Expert+locator+text+indexing

https://github.com/pacobaco/kongfinger

https://google.github.io/opencasebook/patents/