“The elusive open source prior art repository–attempted by
several, failed at by all. What makes the Open Source as Prior Art
(OSAPA) initiative, championed by OSDL, IBM, and others such as
SourceForge.net, and announced by the USPTO Office in January,
likely to succeed where others have failed? The answer can be found
in the timely confluence of pressures on the different
stakeholders, combined with an approach that leverages the existing
resources and strengths of the open source community.“In theory, a prior art repository would be a central,
comprehensive resource housing a vast amount of source code,
information, and abstracts documenting the functionality of free
and open source software in a way that could be searched by the US
Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to locate potentially relevant
prior art…”