On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 2:15 PM Wade Pinkston wrote: > My company manufactures high-end IR sensors, IR Quadrant detectors, IR PSDs, > and associated electronics. ... > Is there a way to release a free software package for Debian, but maintain IP > rights to it?
>From the perspective of your end users, I expect the best option would be a standard interface that works with all the hardware of this kind made by your company and its competitors and a library of FLOSS code that supports that interface. Failing that, a library of FLOSS code that abstracts all the vendor-specific interfaces would be acceptable but more effort to maintain. New entrants would likely have to either copy one of the other existing interfaces or add their own interface to the library. That perspective leads to an ecosystem of vendors focussing on various niches based on price, quality etc rather than one vendor monopolising most of the market through lock-in. That might not be desirable to your company, but if it makes things easier for your potential end users, it might end up growing the market. At some point you might find that your end users will, since they are technical folks, reverse engineer your code and that of your competitors and write the second solution I suggested above. Then you might end up spending time and money maintaining code that none of your end users are using. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
