During this week we have learned about the definitions of inventions, patents and copyrights and thier types. To detect under which category we want to classify our projects. In my opinion my project will not be an invention, so a patent is not necessary. I wnat my project to be an Open Source project but also I need a license to save my copyrights.
There are many types of copyrights. I will mention some of them with a brief explanation about each one:
is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.From Wikipedia
It is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
It is a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software.
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.
The Apache Software Foundation uses various licenses to distribute software and documentation, to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products
I noticed after I read about different types of Licenses that the Creative Commons license is the most appropriate type for me because it organizes the open source copyrights with many options. Other types of license focused on software like BSD and Apache and MIT license is giving all write to modify publish and sell which I didn't like.
There are many types of license and the name of Creative Commons to give the users more option to protect their rights when they publish on the internet. For more information this is the offical website of CC The main types are:
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.
The below picture summarizes all previous license logos:
I want other people to Non-commercialy share my work, modify and improve it but under the same license of my work so I choose Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA). This is the logo of this license which I should put in my final projec page:
Actually to make profit from my project is not one of my plans, at least until this point. I don't know If I will change my mind after I could make my project successfully.
It is too early to decide what I want to do with my project in the future, but in general, if it works perfectly I want to improve my design to be easier to assemble. Another plan is to improve the code to receive G-code files from CD card, maybe to build mobile application to control my robot.