MIT Grad To Make Digital "SixthSense" Open Source

yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."

Comments

Re:paid to the canard?

[icebike]

the counter argument played out by the owners of patents and copyrights is that innovation would be dead if there was not stringent FBI level enforcement of I.P. including stringent fines and jail time.

For some areas of research and development that is quite true.

That argument, while not always totally convincing, might apply when you are seeking a specific solution to a specific problem, such as a medicine to cure a specific disease. There is a vast investment of time and effort needed for such endeavors.

I'm not sure that counts as innovation in the strictest sense, its more like SIFTING thru pre-existing solutions (chemicals) looking for those that are both effective and non-harmful.

For other areas of research "Innovation" would continue even with out patents, because so much of it is Eureka moments, or serendipitous discovery. So would music and film and books, because authors derive a great deal of reward by the art itself, and by being first movers.

In the present case, this innovation was merely a combination of off the shelf products used in an imaginative way.

They "might" have patented it, but then again they probably stepped on several hundred patents in their research, (since three of the key components are off the shelf products) and the patent fight would have been long and brutal, and probably beyond their means.

By releasing it in open source, they prevent anyone else from patenting it, and still get credit for the invention, and possible consulting jobs in the future.

So its not all that different from many opensource projects where the actual product is releases under (say) the GPL, but the developers get paid by other avenues. Linux is free but Linus gets paid.