Imagine that IT was a more mature field, where basic techniques formed a body of knowledge, a "state of the art" (perhaps in a "text-book" for IT), that is know

Imagine that IT was a more mature field, where basic techniques formed a body of knowledge, a "state of the art" (perhaps in a "text-book" for IT), that is known to all "qualified" practitioners. Then, the few innovations that do occur would be truly new (and it'd be immediately clear whether they are or not). A problem with this maturation is the complexity of software, and the many ways to implement the "same" thing. Some fp academics (Smullyan) have gone some substantial way to categorizing different techniques, such as a list of "the" combinators, and ways to determine whether some code really implements that combinator or not. A theory of computation. As it is, we keep "reinventing" the same techniques, because they aren't well-known - and many of us don't want to learn them because it's much more fun to reinvent [mea culpa]. But this is really only half the idea of patenting. Really, the point of patents is not to own new techniques, but to own new ways of solving practical problems. It's not the technique in isolation; the patent should only cover that specific way of solving that specific problem. e.g. the patent on the telegraph should be on a particular solution to transmitting information over long distances - not a patent on connecting wires in a certain way. It should be specific to the problem.