benjamind

As some may recall I recently launched CircuitBee, a service which allows you to web embed your electronics schematics. Upverter also recently launched their product which lets you design schematics in your web browser.

Today, Dangerous Prototypes posted this article:

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/09/21/editorial-upverter-another-closed-source-vampire-exploits-open-hardware-for-ventrue-capital-pr-and-profit/

Which asks for services like ours that help promote Open Source Hardware projects to play fair and open source our code too.

This is quite an interesting topic, I've been trying to think how open sourcing my code for CircuitBee would work from a business perspective. As I see it there are 4 business models for OS software that have been proven to work:

1. Open source the code, and sell support and infrastructure services at a high premium to business users.

2. Sell 'enterprise' or similar editions of the OS software, with additional features that are not OS.

3. Package up the OS software with some other tangible saleable good, usually hardware for the software to run on.

4. Selling further development services to businesses to customize or improve the core OS project.

CircuitBee is aimed at hobbyists - professional electronic schematics are still largely too complex to render in the browser. That means there are no businesses to sell support licenses to, and hobbyists certainly aren't going to pay for support. That largely rules out option 1.

Selling enterprise or improved versions of the software via a software as a service model that extend upon the open sourced version of the software would in my mind still not equate to an open platform. There would always be someone arguing that the platform is still not 'open' since the more useful features that differentiate my service from the inevitable clones based on the OS code would be closed only. So that rules out option 2.

Packaging up the software with another saleable product isn't possible in this case, so no option 3.

Option 4 is the only viable option on the table, but relies upon other businesses wanting customized versions of the platform. Which since the platform is largely unproven and as yet not something businesses are interested in, does not bode well as a business model in the short to medium term.

Added to all of the above is the fact that I am working on this full-time, unfunded and solo. If I opened up the code now, I would very quickly have competitors with all the same features as my own, who could potentially have more funding and manpower to drive the project forward and leave me in the dust with nothing but good intentions and a little bit of kudos for devoting 18 months of my life to something someone else is now profiting from.

What do you think? Is it possible to open source a SaaS project like CircuitBee while still maintaining some form of compensation for the ongoing time, effort and expense it incurs?

Recently we've all seen the uproar when people have gone to read the T&C's from various web services and found them to leave a feeling of 'theft' or some kind of underhand grab for content rights. Personally I hate these legal agreements, I find I can always read it with a different hat on and see it in a different light, perhaps that's the point.

What is clear however, is that web services and startups clearly need a set of T&C's we can use without fear of alienating our customers, but that also protect us legally from future prosection.

Recently I launched my project CircuitBee (http://www.circuitbee.com) which lets you embed electronic schematics like you would a video with YouTube. I've been working on it part time for over 18 months now and finally we got it released. We slapped the Wordpress CC licensed terms and conditions on it and sent it out the door.

We posted about it on the AdaFruit forums today (http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22089), and our first bit of useful feedback has been about the T&C's. It appears we didn't read them closely enough and included a section that covers the licenses the owner of the content grants us to modify, and redistribute the content for the web service. In short, we fell foul of the same legalese that cause DropBox such backlash recently.

Now DropBox recently posted a modification to their terms making it clearer that they want no part in the ownership of the content. I'd like to do something similar for CircuitBee, but of course legal documents are copyrighted just like any other so I can't wholesale copy the DropBox terms. Leading me to this post.

Does anyone know of any good, legal, and above all readable and acceptable set of terms and conditions that are available under a Creative Commons license or something similar?

If not, perhaps there's a lawyer in the room that might like to start drafting some?

Just after the Amazon AppStore launched I decided to test the waters with a free version of one of my apps. The app has done fairly well on the Android Market so far, but I perhaps misjudged the type of users attracted to the Amazon AppStore. The app is immature to say the least, and hasn't gone down very well with Amazon users thus far. But that didn't matter since my main aim was to test out how the Amazon store worked, and whether or not I would use it in the future.

So today I decided to remove my app, since it isn't doing well there and reflects poorly on my work going forward. I contacted Amazon through their help system and asked for the app to be removed. I received a response informing me that the app must be removed from all other similar stores in order for them to remove it from theirs.

I'll post the full email if someone wants to take a look at it, but they pointed me to section 3.a. of the developer agreement:

3.a. Delivery Commitment for Apps. You will deliver electronically to us and continue to make available during the Term all versions of all software applications, games or other digital products (including any special or collector’s editions) (i) that are designed for the Platform, (ii) for which you have the rights required under this Agreement, and (iii) that are the same versions and editions (except as otherwise provided in this Agreement) that you or your affiliates make available directly or indirectly to any Similar Service....

This reads to me like Amazon want all my apps, and won't let me remove them from their store unless I remove them from everywhere! Am I reading this wrong? Or have Amazon laid claim to all the Android apps I've made or ever will make as long as I maintain an account on their AppStore? I'm happy to terminate the contract, which appears to invalidate this clause, but I had hoped to use the store for more useful applications better targeted at the Amazon market in the future so would rather not if I do not have to. But this agreement reads to me as very heavy handed.

Any advice?

Last weekend we were stuck indoors unable to go celebrate the royal wedding, so with a long weekend to spare we decided to do a little side project to solve a problem on Android that's been bugging us.

Its a supplementary IME for Android devices that lets you input any Unicode character with a simple hex interface, recently used characters and browse and search capability.

We've blogged about how it was built here:

http://www.cwd.co.uk/2011/05/04/unicode-keyboard-released/

And its on the market here:

https://market.android.com/details?id=uk.co.cwd.unicodekeyboard

Let us know what you think.

What did you do during the wedding?