“Most of the Internet based technologies that humans consume are based on a mixed bag of open source technologies, one way or another.”
With emerging advanced technologies impacting each corridor of human life, a serious question is “how to regulate open engineering for the greater good of humanity?”
As a non for profit, we are now working with IP protection lawyers towards publishing a new approach to a legally attributable open source license.
This license should protect the interests of creators, when they “engineer or re- engineer” an open source technology.
In our research, we have found that existing licenses do not adequately address Muellners Foundation’s goal of maintaining and supporting humankind centric technologies.
Most of the open licenses originated during pre dot com era or during the first few years of this century.
The prevailing licenses do not strongly merit space for “technology based governance”of open sourced contributions. The licenses have sometimes got grounded in different jurisdictions, with limiting global accommodation of enforcing the licensing contents.
This leaves creators ducking for cover in the face of IP abuse.
The licensing practices in the open source ecosystem can also leave room for parametric exclusions of contributors to an open technology’s “Development Lifecycle”.
Systematic affects on different stakeholders' IP compliance with respect to their open source contributions, have been found.
We have found that none of the licenses accord a very strong incentive to the decentralised community of developers, who contribute to open source projects, from all across the world. They may at best protect the decentralised developer’s liabilities.
We welcome industry peers from open source communities to contribute to this exercise.