Assignment 19: Invention, Intellectual property and Income

Invention, Intellectual property and Income

Intellectual Property

License

MIT License

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Creative Commons

It is easy to comprehend compared to many other licenses. It has very limited restriction over reuse of the code. It is also compatible to many of the existing commonly used licenses like GPL and many other copyleft licenses. The license comes under the category of permissive licenses, which defined as "lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liability. That is pretty enough for our needs now. It states more clearly what all right are vested upon the end user which in my opinion is great. Its ease of use and effectiveness has convinced me to use the same for my entire work dine during Fab Academy.

The literature of the license is as follows

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it. For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions. Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users. Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.

How to use GNU licenses for your own software

1.The process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as "Copyright 1999 Terry Jones"), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL)

2. The copyright notice should include the year in which you finished preparing the release (so if you finished it in 1998 but didn't post it until 1999, use 1998). You should add the proper year for each release; for example, "Copyright 1998, 1999 Terry Jones" if some versions were finished in 1998 and some were finished in 1999. If several people helped write the code, use all their names.

3. Always use the English word "Copyright"; by international convention, this is used worldwide, even for material in other languages. The copyright symbol "©" can be included if you wish (and your character set supports it), but it's not necessary. There is no legal significance to using the three-character sequence "(C)", although it does no harm.

4.You should also include a copy of the license itself somewhere in the distribution of your program. All programs, whether they are released under the GPL or LGPL, should include the text version of the GPL. In GNU programs the license is usually in a file called COPYING.

5.If you have copied code from other programs covered by the same license, copy their copyright notices too. Put all the copyright notices together, right near the top of each file.

For more information on this liciense click here

I'm going allow the above license since it will allow others to modify my work and developing on it while giving me due credits. And to use my work for commercial purpose. I want this concept to grow and gain momentum and I really dont know if this solves the problems well or not. Its something I'm not entirely sure about and want to explore more. Share alike is important since I'll can integrate developments made by other on this basic idea. It can be used for commercial purpose since that the whole point of it. Whoever produces it and makes money will be doing it on his/her own means and methods.

Income

Motivation

In its current form my project can be used as a prototype for the project that can become a source of income. My motivation to make this project is to provide an idea how different alarm systems can be made and they can become source of income.

Source

The source of income can be made by making the actual product and selling it into the market. This product can be extended such as making a mobile application for alarm system, then it can become a good source of income.

Funding

This project doesn't require much funding. I need to invest some time to make it finished and the production will take place based on demand and in a fablab that is extremely cheap to use.