Fab Academy 2019

Progress Documentation - Christian Schmidt

Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

Making Money (Or not)

This week, we concerned ourselves with what to do with our final project after the Fab Academy has ended. I do not plan to make money off my project, because I did it to challenge myself and to develop an open source controller with open source firmware. Thus, I will publish my project as open source, so that anyone that wants to play around with the software and/or hardware can do so, without restrictions. Since the project has a lot of code, and the code base will most likely evolve the most, I think a public git repository will be the most suitable place for the project to reside in.

I will publish the code under the GPLv2, which - in my opinion - is better suited for a software project than the license I use for the rest of this website (which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommericial-ShareAlike license (or in short, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) unless otherwise noted).

There are a couple of differences between the two licenses; in particular, they are not compatible. The Creative Commons license I used makes it possible for others to share and modify the contents of this website - documentation, code, projects, images - as long as the shared content uses the same license, is not used for commercial purposes, and provides credit to the author (i.e. me).

The GPLv2 provides even more freedom to the end user. The software may be used for any means and purposes (including commercial use, which makes it incompatible with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and it may be modified and redistributed under the same license (i.e. GPLv2). However, when the software is redistributed in binary form, the corresponding source code must be made accessible, so potential end users might make their own modifications. Since I wanted to make my project free and accessible for everyone, the GPLv2 seemed a good fit to me.

I prepared a slide highlighting the core parts of the project and a video demonstrating the processes I used to make the project a reality.