?lvaro Lopes wrote: > > But (for example) the "gerbers" be licensed with a small royalty (1-2 > > dollars per phone, with a cap of 500,000 to 1,000,000 USD) only if the > > party will make *over* 5,000-10,000 phones. > > Interesting idea, but would defy the openness of the project IMHO.
I feel a similar uneasiness with this proposal. While these royalties would be extremely friendly compared to what others take, I think they would still limit the power of what is the key differentiator of the whole project, namely the openness. So far, I can think of three areas where such royalties would be troublesome: - they would add a bias that could be perceived as unfair to future major contributors and might set a precedent for an accumulation of claims. - such a license would probably be incompatible with pure CC-BY-SA and similar, discouraging cooperation and limiting the opportunities for reuse (both from and by us). There's also the issue of where you draw the line when people copy only part of the design. - good licenses are simple. The more exceptions and special cases you add, the less comfortable people (and companies) will be with it. There are also many cautionary tales of someone trying to wrap a business model around revenue from an "almost Free" license, and the whole thing leading to protraced arguments and frustration. So I would rather keep the license plain and simple, and try to generate revenue from the value of the design team's experience, visibility, and contacts. > The problem here is we are not developing a "state-of-the-art" phone. I think it's sufficient to have "decent enough" hardware. Most of the ubiquituous features aren't all that expensive to have and you gain little by driving things to the bleeding edge of technology. Instead, we can capitalize on the one truly unique feature we offer, the radical openness. This may have limited appeal to end users outside the geek population, but if I was a VAR, I'd kill for it. - Werner _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
