Creative commons

Creative commons is a set of 6 free licences. The author choose up to 3 charactistics out of 6 which are combined. The licence is displayed with the work in the form of pictograms. The licences are multilayered: a legal layer, a human readable layer and a machine readable one.

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.



Sharealike- If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.



Noderivs- If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.



Noncommercial- You may not use the material for commercial purposes.







Several creative commons plateforms exist such as MITOpenCourseware or Flickr. It is quite easy to set a licence. You simply have to reply to a quick form. I wanted to take the test but my browser ddn't allow me to. I really appreciate the design of CC.

Fab licence

This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose, but must acknowledge "project name". Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability.

The fab licence is quite permissive, the work is not linked to a person but to a project. It is very confidential as it doesn't appear in the Wikipedia's table of open source licences.

Do what the fuck you want to public licence

I really appreciate the title of this licence which is also quite straightforward.

Open source licencing

Open source doesn't mean a work is free of licences and everyone can get a piece of it. Open source licencing is a proactive act. By default copyright applies, it can be loosen by some open source licences, which can be free or not. This Wikihow explains the process of open source licencing. The most liberal ones are probably the BSD ones (and the DWTFYWTPL). The most popular are the GNU GPL. Compatibility between licences is an interesting problematic as the can't be merged easily. This article summarize the situation quite nicely. And this website really helps in the choice of open license

My choice

As I like CC's modularity, design and the fact that it's not software-oriented I would probably go for it for my project. I would like attribution and sharealike. As I don't think my project will be prototype material I would really like others to take over and why not make a product out of it.



But I have a major questioning, does a licence inform you when someone reuse your work? If none, I might be tempted to keep the default copyright as at least permission has to be asked, which allows the author to be aware of the use of his work. When should I switch from copyright to CC? What is the most appropriate timing.

First I am planning to make a protoype which will allow me to get the diploma.
Then I hope to have time to improve this prototype, maybe with technologies not available at WoMa.
As I would probably lack objectivity at a certain point I would ask for second opinions. This might take different forms: design thinking workshop, startup/open bidouille weekend, beta-tests.... This period would be dedicated to collect inputs from makers, future users. The feedbacks would be stored in a database and federated in a community. There would be an interface which would illustrate the project and its forks -on which the names of the people who suggested improvments would be mentioned.
I am conscious I would simply have laid the foundations of quite a complex project (energy harvesting, energy storage) which could be greatly improve maybe by students.
As the project progress I would like to ask the opinion of experts in prototyping such as Usine IO. First I would take part in their workshop then why not ask them about joining the incubator.
I would at this stage evaluate the cost of producing a small serie to test to scaling and motivate a crowdfunding. If the cost is below 10000 euros I might as for help at the ADIE which is a micro-loan service for people which don't have access to banking loans.
I would do a crowdfunding on a plateform that give access to the funds even if the taget isn't reached.
In parallel the growth of the community would be proactively fed by taking part in events in popular places such as Les Grands voisins.
I would also present my prototype in challenges such as Cisco + MakeSense one.