Continuing the discussion from HTM, kaggle.com and licensing:
Numenta has patents filed for HTM technology, but if you choose to create your own HTM implementation, we do not control how you license that code. We want to encourage people to create their own HTMs for research and academic purposes, but if you want to create a commercial application with an HTM codebase that is not AGPL, there are some issues that need to be resolved.
Note that as @fergalbyrne mentioned in the original discussion, there is a grey area here.
The Grey Area
Let’s say you create an HTM implementation in your favorite language. You decide to license it as MIT, which is completely legal, but very misleading. Why is it misleading? Well, you might not be planning on creating a commercial application with your MIT HTM codebase, but everyone else in the world will see that MIT license and incorrectly assume that they can create anything they want with it with no restrictions.
In this case, I encourage everyone who creates an open source project that uses HTM tech to put a legal disclaimer like this one:
#Legal Note
This code is licensed under the MIT license, with one caveat. Numenta owns patents on specific items. While this code was written without using any of Numenta’s code, it is possible that those patent laws still apply. Before using this code commercially, it is recommended to seek legal advice.
Numenta is not in the business of patent trolling. We want you to use HTM technology. We want you to do your own experiments and research, and we want to make it easy and cheap for startups to make HTM a core part of their business, hence our licensing guide (PDF) includes a royalty-free “Startup Package”.
This company has put over a decade of research and development into HTM. Because of the patents we’ve filed for this technology, the AGPL license was the only way we could go open source while protecting this portfolio and retaining the value of all this work. I hope everyone understands that Jeff could have easily kept all this secret and created a proprietary company, but wanted to share it with the world. I am thrilled to be a part of this, and I think the AGPL and patent strategy Numenta keeps is logical and fair. If anyone has any questions, please let me know.