Week17 : invention, intellectual property, and income
The Choice of a Licences
I believe in the power of sharing ideas while maintaining some attribution and protection to rights of the individual the powerful and the weak. Those thoughts mght seem idealist in the commercial world or not relevant to some. To me the simple rights are to be able as humans to share ideas freely without restriction because that has proven time after time the power and the level of collective innovation we are able to reach. First to the author who initiated the first spark of ideas this will provide an environment for growth. Thoughts are dynamic and can be influenced by the different point of views that could interact with it at a given moment. The author himself might need to benieft again from the far reached branches at one point in the future. My stand is the following : I would encourage anyone to visit my work, be free to cite or not where applicable and even plant one whole branch in a different soil, I am just curious to get feedback on the results.
Finding something matching this in the world of open licenses requires some examination, I tried to explore the most used and that I came accross frequently.
CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License Text
This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.
You are free: to Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format to Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Under the following terms:
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.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Applications
Hardware, Documents & Files, Software
Pros
Openes
Open license.
Liability
Provides basic liability protections, though not explicit in the License text.
Attribution
Requires that the attribution is given on derived works and that derived works remain open source.
Easy to understand
Has an easy-to-understand utility for choosing the style of the Creative Commons one wants to use.
"Attribution-NonCommercial" is popular optional clause, which restricts work to non-commercial use. It's good to have the option to do so.
Cons
"Attribution-NonCommercial"
Though can protect the author it might form a constrain on the user if he wants to commercialize the work and have it produced in scale, this is an issue that might arise when one decides to use this option.
Use for Software not recommended
I initially thought that this license is a good option for my entire work, but while going through the FAQs I noticed the following answer to the use for softwares.
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available.
Which would pose a problem sense part of the work would contain a software in one form eventually.
Highlights of 4.0
A more global license
"Porting" the licensing body has worked with experts and stakeholders to make 4.0 the most internationally enforceable of CC license.
Clarity about adaptation
In this version it clarify that those who adapt the original work can apply any license to their contributions so long as this license doesn’t prevent later users from complying with the original license. This was understood from previous versions but in this one it's has it much explicit.
MIT License
License text
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this hardware, software, and associated documentation files (the "Product"), to deal in the Product without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Product, and to permit persons to whom the Product 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 Product.
THE PRODUCT 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 PRODUCT OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE PRODUCT.
Applications
Hardware, Documents & Files, Software
Pros
Short and Simple
The MIT license is one of the shortest licenses of all the major recognized open source licenses. The full text is just 3 paragraphs long.
Openess
Open license.
Liability
Provides basic liability protections. That's explicitly mention in the licnese, with that the author of the software avoids any risk for how the software may be used by others.
License notice must be included
Requires that the associated copyright notice is included in derived works. Similar to the Modified BSD License, except does not prohibit the use of the name of the copyright holder in promotion.
Permasive
The license basically allows anyone to do whatever they want with the code as long as the original copyright and license notice is included along with the copy of the code. The code can be used for commercially, privately, it can be modified and it can be distributed.
Cons
Open code locked in Propriatory software
The MIT license doesn't protect against open-source code being taken (without payment) and used in proprietary software. This is harmful to user freedom because it lets future development be taken out of the public domain and instead moved into non-free programs. In addition, it doesn't protect against software patents being used to attack user freedom. Unlike the Apache 2.0 and GPLv3 licenses, the MIT/Expat was written before software patents became a problem and doesn't include a patent release.
My Choice
I was convinced to use the CCBY-SA 4.0 for many reasons
Derived works must remain open source
Derived work can have a different license type
Derived work can be sold for profit
I think the factor that influenced my decision is the first one, which simply keeps the original work in the public domain. MIT on the other hand is much simplified and more permissive but doesn't force the derived work to be open. Which could be a reason for it permissivness. While the draw back of CCBY-SA is it's use for software. I checked other available licenses like Apache 2.0 which shares similarities to MIT while also provides an express grant of patent rights from contributers, but again similar to MIT the drived work is not necessarly in public domain. GNU GPL is a copyleft license that requires anyone who distributes the authores code or a derivative work to make the source available under the same terms which in it self pose some restrictions on derived or adapted work, but similar to Apache 2.0 provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users.
The Unlicense
So there is a conundrum! How to find a good license for the code to keep derived work circulating in the public domain while not restricting the choice of License to the author of the next remix. For now I decided to go for CCBY-SA 4.0 for Design work and The Unlicense for the code. I would like though to preserve my right to change the license in the future to something more permessive yet prevent the code of being locked in propriatory or used in software that violates the freedom of others.
The Unlicense according to the describtion provided
The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license.
The following is 'The Unlicense'
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means. In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law. 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 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. For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>
Making Possibilities Probabilities
I have initiated a project in our lab that attempted to work with specialist in occupational therapy and prosthetic fields collaborativly with patients or their families to develop customizes prosthetics and orthotics solutions, we ran an initial workshop in 2016. I would like to see my final project and related work adding value to our community and this region that has a high percentage of people losing limbs due to complications of diabetes.
I will attempt to do the following:
Initiate a project with regional group Fab labs to address diabetes and use this project as a first initiative.
Share the results and files
Publish the project through a git repository and have regular development cycles driven by regular events
This version will always be available in the public domain and I will put great efforts to keep it that way. Further enhancements and developments could be produced commercially with an aim to have cost subsidized by local health entities or backers to further sustain the development efforts. Some of the inital cost of research and development can be crowd funded.
First would be regluar meetups with stakeholders and domain experts. Those events would end with a crowd funding campagain, the target are end users or family members of patints with similar complications. Those would be also part of the product feed back loop as early adopters and beneficiaries. Methods to quantify their functional and design feedback will be implemented on a webportal where they will be providing input on specific user experience questions. At this stage the design is human centered in it's approach.
The fabrication process will be centralized in the inital phase and progressively and through workshops in local communities would build the fabrication capacity to the hyper local facility. We would try to utilize fabrication capabilities available in the comunity or work with funding agencies to provide those facilities with the necessary means to fabricate.
The next phase would be community driven, where makers in the community would tie up with end users to fabricate a customized orthotic solution using detailed describtions of fabrication and assembly process that has been fine tuned in the first phase of the project.
I would expect any commerical outcome to the project to sustain this network of users and local fabricators and provide for the continouse development and support and associated costs of coordinating the development process, administrting the network and the supply chain.
So the way I invision it is simply the following