19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
This week’s assignment had us think about our ways of project presentation. For the final presentation, there is going to be a hero video with some minor (bad) acting, but for now I used this status update video on my mockup for the assignment:
The presentation slide I unfortunately couldn’t tackle yet, but I am going to use Scribus (a Desktop Publishing Tool) or Inkscape to create the presentation slide. Scribus is a very powerful layouting tool I have some experience with from making posters, which is a bit more powerful than Inkscape when it comes to text flowing over into other text boxes and such. We’ll see! Here’s a mockup of what might come later:
Dissemination Plans¶
Since I firmly believe in the strength and benefits of Open Source Software and Hardware, I will make the plans, design files and software freely available and open source. There’s so many smart people in the world that by releasing a project out in the open, one can only gain improvements from doing so. Since I’d like for this mindset to be passed on by anyone who uses my designs (which, also, rest on similar foundations), I want to pick a license that enforces (/encourages) doing so. At the same time, the works should not be commercialized without approval. Thus, I picked following license for my works:
Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike, International License
In detail, this means that this is a Creative Commmons license (this is the license name), which, when the licensed materials are used require attribution to the original author. The licensed material can only be used for non-commercial purposes and it is valid internationally. The material can be shared and adapted freely (otherwise it would have to be a NoDerivative license), but progressing works need to use the same or a compatible license - this is the ShareAlike aspect of the license.
Since the plans are freely available and the software behind the project partially uses libraries that are themselves licensed as non-commercial, I do not plan to distribute kits of the materials. It should stay open to the maker which microprocessor she wants to use to further improve on the design.