I was kind of wandering if it would be necessary to patent something just to ensure someone else did patent *your* idea, if you came up with one.
Nope.
Or can you publish, and then say that's prior art, so no one else can go patent your idea.
This works. IBM used to have publish a monthly journal (I forget the name, it came out of one of their Yorktown labs) that did exactly this kind of thing for exactly this kind of reason. ACtually, they wrote about stuff that they thought was 5-10 years away.
even phil zimmerman is selling the rights to pgp. what about all the people who contributed code (like me) ... . ask phil about me and when i asked about sharing profits from the code i conrtibuted. also about the deal with r.f...
Mr/Ms. Anonymous is lying. His/her name appears nowhere in the credits, and his/her code appears nowhere in any PGP release. Don't waste any neurons on it. /r$