Everyone who is currently involved in the production (and consumption) of Open Source Software is aware that the major threat to it's continued existence and ability to thrive is the patenting of software inventions. I have no interest in getting into a discussion about whether software can have inventions since I believe that the real issue with patents (generally) is that of obviousness.

Nowadays there are rarely any truely novel ideas, this is especially true for those who work and specialize in a particular area. For example Amazons "one-click purchase" patent is blatantly absurd since it patents a business process and is an obvious invention for anyone who is operating an online business.

Given the above, this page enumerates the ideas employed in hoglet and is a clear declaration that they are obvious extensions of existing software ideas (or they may in fact be new ideas but also obvious to anyone with relevant skills/knowledge of this particular field of computing).

• Use of "tags" to markup particular sections of a document.
• Use of a processor to parse source text and "find" the tags and allow them to be operated on in some way.
• Allow the use of user-defined "tags" and allow the tags to be "mapped" to a piece of arbitrary code that is used by the processor to operate on the tag.

I would encourage others with Open Source Software projects to produce a similar statement of obviousness of ideas employed, so that patent offices worldwide (it's not just a problem in the U.S.!) can more easily find "prior art" and reject the absurd patents currently being filed.