I am interested in the issue of patenting ideas that have already been put into practice or that would be obvious to any of many practitioners. I have a patent and my patent attorney included in the ideas that were not new. We were not motivated to spend the time and money to revise the patent to avoid this. The patent examiner had little experience in programming and missed the old ideas. I would be curious to know what software patents exist and the outcome of any court fights to overturn patents on ideas that were indeed not new. I am not good a keeping track of publications where I have learned of ideas but I often do know people who were using various ideas going back to 1955 when I began programming professionally. I do not know very much about patent law but I understand that IBM, for instance, regularly publishes "Technical Disclosures" which is mostly comprised of the work products of IBM patent attorneys when they have decided that it is not worth the expense of patenting some particular idea. It would be good to have a public repository of programming ideas that are good but not worth patenting. Let me know how I can help.