Comment by Kim_Bruning

I get the feeling that FLOSS holds the niche that software patents were supposed to hold. To wit, it publicly discloses methods of the art to a practitioner in such a way that (s)he can fully implement it.

Software patents don't actually do this to a sufficient granularity (at least imao) , but get paid for; while floss does this to sufficient granularity that a compiler actually can implement it.

Basically we seem to have a collection of loose bits that variously ensures we have a public foundation for software development, and other loose bits that ensure people get paid for disclosing things.

The thing we don't have is one single cohesive system where people get paid to disclose the state of the art as a public foundation for software development.