Since this will be my first post, I want to say that i read a lot about Arduino and really see the potential in this platform. Keep it up guys.
Back to my question. At the place where I work we have a very nice and new technology Wireless Sensor Network communication protocol. It would be nice to port this technology towards Arduino. This technology is developed in an open innovation platform among certain companies. However the current status is that this technology is treated as proprietary knowledge to the outside world. The knowledge mainly consists of smart algorithms in software (already patented). So my question is what are the possibilities to release it on the Arduino platform. Is it for instance possible to release this knowledge as a closed source library/stack, it can then be used as communication protocol.
We know that it is an open source platform, however this technology can be used as protocol without knowing how it works in detail. Since the business model is not yet determined for this technology we do not want to make it public open source yet. Without the open source aspect the protocol can still be of much use in projects (research etc), and nice fun to play with it.
How can we combine the perspective of Arduino with our technology. We think that there is a lot of potential and therefor we want the release it in your community, before having all the business details in place.
If the technology is already patented then the smart algorithms are already public - it is one of the central tenets of patent law that you make your invention public when applying. If course your code which implements these may well not be public.
You could allow the Arduino community to develop potentially compatible devices without revealing anything more than is public already by posting the patent publication numbers and perhaps indicating which of the embodiments described in the patent allow interaction with your commercial implementation. A patent has to allow the "skilled worker" to reproduce your invention and the Arduino community is collectively pretty skilled so if it can be done and is worth the effort they will most likely do the rest!
You are competing against XBee, WiFi, ANT, etc. which have well established hardware and software. Why will people jump on your new technology? Do you think the Arduino community will embrace your technology just because it is better technology? I don't...I think you will need to compete by providing the same infrastructure in software and hardware that currently exists, AND better technology (for the same price )
So IMHO you're asking the wrong question. People want solutions, not technologies. If you can provide a solution that has advantages over existing solutions, most (guessing?) people won't care that it's open/closed source. Look at XBee's -- they're closed source and immensely popular.
If you just want to release the (closed source) software, it will be of academic interest at best IMHO.
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This raises the question of what you want to get out of it?
Are you after people developing some sort of killer app with this and you then hit them for royalties?
In general people here are very suspicious of closed system and are not very likely to put in much time developing stuff using them especially when you don't know when you are going to get whacked.
Grumpy_Mike:
This raises the question of what you want to get out of it?
Are you after people developing some sort of killer app with this and you then hit them for royalties?
In general people here are very suspicious of closed system and are not very likely to put in much time developing stuff using them especially when you don't know when you are going to get whacked.
It is not our intention to "back stab" people, our culture is open innovation. The wish with porting our technology to Arduino is to have an easy to use prototyping environment. Since we work with educational institutes it is a pro to have Arduino compatible hardware. Also to interest other people to work with our technology. (Summarized: extend active community among our technology).
Some highlights of the technology are ultra low power, scalable far beyond the limitation of zigbee, inspired on biology, robust network based on smart dust principle.
For now I only have one question left. If we deliver some software that can cooperate with the libraries used by arduino, are we obligate to do this under a certain license?
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