Improvement

An improvement, in patent law, is something that qualifies for a patent of its own. Required reintegration clauses in a software license (or presumably other types of license as well such as the GFDL) keep one unified "best version" licensed under the same terms as the original patent or copyrighted document.

The Consumerium License will have to specify how any improvement that is generated in the R&D wiki or opinion wiki or Consumerium maintenance etc. is to be documented, published, owned and integrated. To ignore this issue, as open source tries to do, is really quite a disaster and opens the door to a self-interested fork problem as various players and factions all define their own "better versions" and patent them to prevent "the enemy" from using them. This in turn generates politics as usual, which can be reduced somewhat by being clear about improvements from day one. Many threats and worst cases focus on this issue and how a fork can generate both improvements and cause a bad copy problem.