legal, intellectual-property, copyright, open-sourceI am leading a group of professionals from relevant but different industries; my role is that of a BDFL; We are building a set of tools and methodologies (a bit similar to this one).
The choice of going open source is not solely because of altruism, rather it’s because we believe the following:
It will encourage more people to contribute and develop the products
The geographical areas in which we intend to deploy, will mostly be developing economies - and copyright laws are (shall we say) “not as enforceable” over there as in the West* - in any case; We want to actively encourage use, adoption (and possible improvement) by individuals, but don’t want to see commercial use without licensing.
I have a set of ideas of how to go about this, but I wanted to hear other ideas first, to see if I’m on the right path.
So, given that we want to opensource our products (mostly architectural designs and technologies for building low cost housing etc) - can someone suggest a way where we can monetize our activities?
[[Note*]]
It may seem I had contradicted myself when I said copyright laws were largely not enforceable in the areas in which we intend to deploy - and yet wanted to apply some sort of copyleft. What I mean however is that, I don’t think it’s worth hounding some poor bugger who decided to use our designs etc to build a house for himself and his family etc - they’ll be too many of them to contend with in that environment, so instead, we’ll encourage them to use, adapt the products and provide feedback.
On the other hand, we keep our gunpowder dry and turn our full fury on businesses who want to ride of our coat tails and profit from our hard work. there will be fewer of those, and we can focus on dealing with them in court.
Monetization is generally done by selling consolation services and support, or by a dual licensing system where your s/w is free to use for OSS/non-commercial, but has a license fee for commercial use.
You might also be able to sell anonymized usage statistics, or “how to” books, plans and templates and the like, or even by on-site advertising or by merchandising (T-shirts, mugs, posters, etc).
You could also sell parts, passing on cost savings obtained by bulk purchase and sell construction services. Even low interest micro-loans could raise funds to plough back.
For an altruistic endeavour, such as yours, you might also consider sponsorship (the Bill & Melinda gates foundation springs to mind).
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