I posted this earlier in the previous discussion about "Nobody Likes the “Idea Guy”":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283625

>I have a test I run before wasting time talking about ideas: have I spent at least as much time trying to implement this idea as I've spent talking about it? If not, and if the idea's any good, then it's time to shut the fuck up and sit down and start coding. That gives me much more time to talk about ideas I've already implemented.

>I'm not saying you shouldn't talk or write about ideas, but that you should try to strike a balance, like tacking a sailboat against the wind. You learn some things from talking with other people and writing to organize your thoughts, then you learn other things from shutting the fuck up, writing code, and using what you built.

>33 years ago I was lucky enough to come up with a good enough idea to shut the fuck up and implement, which proved it was good enough to talk and write more about, which led to many more rounds of implementation, changes, talking and writing. Now I'm learning how to program Blender in Python, to do yet another round, by learning from and building on top of other people's work!

Some links to stuff I published, instead of patenting:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (Written 30 years after the 1988 CHI paper.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

Pie Menu Timeline (Pie menu related work by other people and myself.):

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-timeline-21bec9b2162...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (1988 CHI paper.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menu Cookbook (An early article from 1988.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-cookbook-2ccc49547c9d

How to Choose with Pie Menus — March 1988 (An early article from 1988.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-m...

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus (December 1991 Doctor Dobb's Journal cover article, User Interface issue.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus. (A discussion of problems with the patent system.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...

Another point I'll add about patenting and restricting -vs- freely publishing and sharing ideas and code:

The University of Maryland Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent pie menus, and hold off talking or publishing about them or distributing any source code, until after the patent application was complete. But instead, I decided not to patent them, and to publish about them and share the free source code immediately.

Had I followed their advice, I would not have been able to freely use MY OWN IDEAS in subsequent open source and commercial products while working for myself or other companies (like NeWS, UniPress Emacs, X10 and X11 window managers, SimCity, and The Sims, and various open source implementations), because I or my employer would have had to negotiate a license with the University.

Even if the license only cost one penny, the lawyers who I or my employer would have had to hire to negotiate that one penny license would have been prohibitively expensive. And I would not have been able to use them in free open source software, either.

You probably are not going to be working for the same company (or University) for the rest of your life, and you probably are going to want to take your own ideas with you and continue to develop and use them, so it's a bad idea to sign your ideas away to the institution you currently happen to be working for, in exchange for some chump change and a framed certificate of appreciation.