And beyond this, solving the problem is just the baseline. Solving the problem well can take an immense amount of time, often producing solutions that appear overly simplistic in the end.

I recently watched a talk about ongoing Java language work (Project Valhalla). They’ve been working on this particular set of performance improvements for years without a lot to show for it. Apparently, they had some prototypes that worked well but were unwieldy to use. After a lot of refinement, they have a solution that seems completely obvious. It takes a lot of skill to come up with solutions like that, and this type of work would be unjustly punished by algorithms like this.

My understanding of a patent (in the US) is that it’s only for new, novel concepts, often difficult to design or conceive.

Prior art, in this context, are just examples of this concept already in use or demonstrated. If there are already examples of the idea in use by others, then your idea isn’t new (and therefore not patentable).

I’m one that finds the GNU/Linux naming annoying. I think calling it that is mostly silly, and am mostly annoyed at people who militantly argue it’s the only way to describe a Linux OS (which aren’t as common as they used to be).

To me, it’s just overly verbose and pointless. For the most part, the GNU part has been implied for pretty much any mainstream form of Linux for decades. And even if it wasn’t, who cares? Like, you wouldn’t say that you run KDE/X11/wpasupplicant/neovim/docker/pacman/paru/systemd/GNU/Linux… Just saying KDE on Arch Linux is simpler and far more informative.