Assuming the business in question is fully able to monetize their initial offering within 4 years, they could then (after being bombed :-P) opt for a full commercial license with full fees. I like it! It offers a way to charge a minimal affordable fee initially while the business model awaits confirmation - while still offering the original rights owner the ability to capitalize later when affordable by the customer.
Interesting... On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 7:26 AM, Fergal Byrne <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi guys, > > After a wonderful weekend at the hackathon, Richard Crowder and I were > brainstorming as we walked around Manhattan on Monday. We came up with a > new (or new twist on an) idea for dual Open Source/Commercial projects. We > call it the Time-bombed Open License [1]. > > The idea is that you release your software under something strongly > copylefted like the GPL for non-commercial use. For commercial users (who > often can't use GPL software inside their own codebase or business), you > charge a fee to absolve the customer from all the GPL obligations, but with > a catch. > > Your ability to operate the commercial license is time-bombed for 2-4 > years, after which time it becomes fully GPL (or whichever your OSS license > is). This is transitive, so your customers must also start a time-bomb of > the same length. > > We'd welcome feedback on this idea from you guys, and wonder would this be > of interest for Numenta's commercial license for NuPIC? It might also be > worth thinking about for nupic-community projects (this would involve > Numenta granting commercialisation rights to these projects). > > Regards, > > Fergal Byrne > > > [1] http://occupystartups.me > -- > > Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT > > http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology > http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne > > Founder of Clortex: HTM in Clojure - > https://github.com/nupic-community/clortex > > Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC > Read for free or buy the book at https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines > > e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179 > Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org > Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie > -- *With kind regards,* David Ray Java Solutions Architect *Cortical.io <http://cortical.io/>* Sponsor of: HTM.java <https://github.com/numenta/htm.java> [email protected] http://cortical.io
