In an ideal world, all intellectual property would become public domain after 10-15 years, including all research, schematics, wire diagrams, source code, marketing materials, etc. When you go to the various offices to get your IP recognized you must also submit various materials and continue to do so for the life of your property rights.
Again though, in an ideal world. In reality any major changes to something like copyright would probably get you killed even faster than judges who are hard on drugs. The most that we, the people, can do until there’s some amount of backbone in our various countries is to remove ourselves from the primary market wherever we can. For instance, I have been on a successful Nintendo boycott for the last 8 years, and it’s been even longer for Disney. I buy anything I want secondhand or pirate it directly, I don’t pay into SaaS but use alternatives, and I feel a lot happier being ungovernable in this way.
Patents already require that all information be available, for someone similarly invested in the craft, to be able to completely reproduce the invention.
That doesn’t require an implementation - but that mirrors our regular patent office, which does not require physical functioning prototypes to demonstrate.
Have you filed or read any software patents? Many are so vague that they do not embody any significant "idea" or contribution, and are mostly just a hindrance to actual innovation. And some are just plain stupid, like the patent to average two integers without overflow.
Like the parent said, a compromise could be "source or GTFO". But even that seems of questionable value.
The shit show gets to the point where many companies file patents defensively. They'll file a patent just in case their competition does it first, even if they have nothing to show for it. And this naturally affects smaller companies disproportionately because they do not have the funds to pay lawyers (there is a hilarious interview on Youtube of a small startup CEO that explains how his company spends more on lawyers than engineers.)
So tl;dr, we'd probably be better off without software patents altogether.
