Hi guys, After a wonderful weekend at the hackathon, Richard Crowder and I were brainstorming as we walked around Manhattan on Monday. We came up with a new (or new twist on an) idea for dual Open Source/Commercial projects. We call it the Time-bombed Open License [1].
The idea is that you release your software under something strongly copylefted like the GPL for non-commercial use. For commercial users (who often can't use GPL software inside their own codebase or business), you charge a fee to absolve the customer from all the GPL obligations, but with a catch. Your ability to operate the commercial license is time-bombed for 2-4 years, after which time it becomes fully GPL (or whichever your OSS license is). This is transitive, so your customers must also start a time-bomb of the same length. We'd welcome feedback on this idea from you guys, and wonder would this be of interest for Numenta's commercial license for NuPIC? It might also be worth thinking about for nupic-community projects (this would involve Numenta granting commercialisation rights to these projects). Regards, Fergal Byrne [1] http://occupystartups.me -- Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne Founder of Clortex: HTM in Clojure - https://github.com/nupic-community/clortex Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC Read for free or buy the book at https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179 Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie
