Invention, Intellectual Property and Income
This is the last week for the amazing Fab Academy. The final lesson: how to spread the project - a doable dissemination plan.
For a open sourced project, you don't really need to put too much effort on how others could really replicate the object or how do people get access to the material or the way manufacturing.
But when it goes to a product, material, cost and accesibilities is very important. For now I don't have any solid manufacturing plan for this.
On top of that, a lot of works is needed before a product can be bring to factory:
supply sourcing - from a bunch of suppliers not just one
industrial design - mechanics also
electronics & product certification - CE / FCC / UE / REACH...
brand / trademark registration - in different countries
IP searching - in different countries too
business development - marketing, sales, channel building
......Anyhow, let us presume we will put the gadget on to shelf someday.
By its nature, this product will only attract coffee enthusiasts not general public.
There are few things I would like to do to penetrate enthusiasts market (not in any order):
I choose to use MIT License, the reason is, quote from Wikipedia:
"While the MIT as permissive license puts only very limited restrictions and requirements on reuse of code and software, it is not without restriction like public domain."
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) <2016>
JC Chang || jc.cy.chang@gmail.com
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.
Noted that my license for the project are only limited to the documentation and software codes, not to any hardware specification.