Re: Free Software Guidelines Question
On 04/04/2019, Wade Pinkston <jddbull@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
Very interesting!
Some preliminary technical questions I'd ask about the software itself are:
- does it run in user space or in kernel space?
- does it include kernel drivers?
- what are its dependencies at run-time
- what about its build dependencies
For example, it's unlikely that Debian could include your software if
the build dependencies are not included in Debian themselves.
> 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.)
I'd argue that if your edge is based on software alone, it's pretty
thin and easy to attack anyway. If your competitors can copy your
hardware, they for sure can copy your software too: widely distributed
software is not a good envelope for trade secrets.
So I would suggest you to move to a clever open source approach.
While often confused, Open Source is not Free Software despite they
can use the similar licenses. Open Source doesn't have anything of the
hackers' ethics that inspired Free Software, but it is a very
effective marketing tool.
For example, you might use a very strong copyleft (easy to trigger and
with wide reach) on both hardware design and software so that you can
then sue those who modify your hardware design (include parts of it
into larger projects) or your software without sharing the derived
work for copyright infringement.
NOTE: that this is not the same of a patent as they CAN use and modify
both the hardware and the software without asking for permission as
long as they give back.
This sort of tactics are pretty usual in the free software world.
They have literally marginalized empires out of their terrain (the
most evident example has been Google Chrome and their famous Trojan
horse, Google Chrome Frame), but Open Source has often been successful
to attack monopolies and even take entire market niches heavily
controlled by small but powerful oligopolies.
> 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?
Releasing free software don't wave your IP rights, but give certain
rights to licensees for free.
Yet if the code is not available and the licensees cannot modify it,
it is NOT Free Software (or open source).
You can still setup a Debian repository on your servers to distribute
easy to install Debian packages, but it's unlikely it could go on
Debian.
OTOH, if you want to try the Open Source marketing card, depending on
the license you choose (and apparently a few other political
considerations) your packages might land into Debian (either in free
or in non-free archive).
Useful reads to this aim are (IMHO):
https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#debian-legal_tests_for_DFSG_compliance
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2018/12/msg00070.html
Good work!
Giacomo
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