Hello, and thank you for taking the time to read this (and hopefully respond:)
My company manufactures high-end IR sensors, IR Quadrant detectors, IR PSDs, and associated electronics. I have recently been getting more and more requests to release a Debian package to help our customers interface with our hardware in the Debian environment. We have had a solid in-house Debian program going for quite awhile now in order to test various electronic accessories such as ADC and DAQ boards for the various MPU and MCU boards out there. We have no issue with offering a free software package usable in Debian, and would very much like to make it available. The issue is our commercial competition. We have been copied several times now at the hardware level, and our ability to be the frontrunner in our industry depends very much on the fact that we are constantly adapting to new technology (moving on from old standards like NI, LabView, MatLab, ect. even though this has meant that products that used to sell for $2500 and were 100% proprietary are no longer feasible (our end users are engineers, and they are going to figure this all out on their own, so it makes zero sense to try to hang on to an old model.)
So my question is this- Is there a way to release a free software package for Debian, but maintain IP rights to it?, or at least make the code unavailable. If so , what is the best way to do this?
Best Regards,
-Wade