ULPs and Scripts

I am using Eagle professionally and have been developing useful ULPs and

Scripts that make work flow much faster.  I am thinking of selling my

add-ons to other businesses to add to my profits.  Is there a licensing

issue with doing this?  If so, would CadSoft be willing to buy my

packaged add-ons?

Hi Dan,

I hope you are doing well. There is no licensing issue with what you are

suggesting. The only problem I see is that your proprietary ULPs,

wouldn't be proprietary for very long.

ULPs are source available, they are just simple text files which can be

read and studied. There's no measure for creating closed add-ons and

such, since the structure is inherently very open. That's the part that

would be difficult.

With that said, I don't make any business decisions around here so if

you would like to propose the idea please e-mail support@cadsoftusa.com

or sales@cadsoftusa.com and we'll forward it to the appropriate person.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

Daniel Hobson wrote on Sun, 12 April 2015 00:26

I am using Eagle professionally and have been developing useful ULPs

and Scripts that make work flow much faster.  I am thinking of selling

my add-ons to other businesses to add to my profits.

While I can believe your scripts and ULPs are valuable to you, most likely

you are grossly overestimating their value to others.  In particular, their

commercial value is basically zero.

Lots of people have created useful scripts and ULPs that make their

workflow faster.  Occasionally they might be useful to others, but even

that is very different from others perceiving them as useful enough to

actually pay for.

I have created various ULPs and scripts too, and couldn't get along without

them myself.  Even though I can't imagine how others get along without my

wonderful ULPs, somehow most of them do.  For example, I created a whole

automatic BOM generation system as soon as you could have arbitrary

attributes in version 5, and long before CadSoft brought forth their own

ULPs and scripts for the same purpose (unfortunately CadSoft then did their

own thing, even though my scripts and ULPs were freely available and

documented, so now my stuff looks non-standard to anyone new, but that's a

different story).  I also have ULPs for making assembly drawings, a

component index list with both board and schematic locations, aligning text

in different ways, etc.

Anyway, the point is that I tried to look at the value of my ULPs and

scripts realistically, and decided that getting any money for them simply

wasn't going to work or be a lot more trouble than it was worth.  Instead I

decided the best way to get value out of them, other than using them myself

of course, was to give them away for free.  Put another way, trying to get

money looked like a losing business proposition, but getting some positive

reputation instead was possible and much less work to do.

I could have upload the ULPs and scripts to the Eagle site, but I already

had other free downloadable software on my site, so I instead added the

Eagle Tools as a separate release within my existing mechanism.  Once or

twice a year I run the release script, which captures the latest code and

packages it up into a self-extracting EXE, and upload it to my web site.

Even if no reputation is ever gained, the cost is low enough that it

doesn't matter.

So this is all to say, forget about selling your stuff.  It all has to be

in source code form anyway, so there is no way to keep it on a leash if you

tried.  Instead, give it away and become a hero among your peers if it's

really as good as you say.  At least that won't result in negative value as

selling will.

If you are really trying get reputation points for your code, make sure to

put your name prominantly at the top.  I didn't do that with any of my

stuff, and some of it seems to have taken on a life of its own.  For

example, I originated the "shorts" library that seems to be floating around

in various guises now.  If I really cared about that, I would have put my

name on it prominently.  You do seem to care and think your stuff is

valuable, so make sure your name is on it.

On a separate topic, it would be interesting to see what your software

does.  At least provide a brief description of your ULPs, scripts, and

programs here.  You might get some interesting feedback on what others have

already done but not bothered to make a big deal of.  Or, maybe you'll even

find I'm wrong and everyone does want a copy.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

Thanks for pointing those things out.  Guess I will be keeping my competitive edge to self and concentrate on servicing my clients.

Thanks again,

Dan@netlistpcb.com

www.netlistpcb.com

Along the same line as above, consider this:

Copyleft (a play on the word copyright) is the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a creative work as freely available to be modified, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the creative work to be free as well.^[1]

Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works such as computer software, documents, and art. In general, copyright law is used by an author to prohibit recipients from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the work. In contrast, under copyleft, an author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it and require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement.

Copyleft licenses (for software) require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying the work must be made available to recipients of the executable. The source code files will usually contain a copy of the license terms and acknowledge the author(s).

Copyleft type licenses are a novel use of existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available. The GNU General Public License, originally written by Richard Stallman, was the first copyleft license to see extensive use, and continues to dominate the licensing of copylefted software. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, provides a similar license provision condition called ShareAlike.

If you do this, you would avoid the problem of someone else taking your work and try to copyright it intentionally because you have committed it to public domain. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft and research some so you get what you intend.

Clem

Daniel Hobson wrote on Tue, 14 April 2015 16:48

Guess I will be keeping my competitive edge to self and concentrate on

servicing my client.

It would still be interesting to hear what your software does.  A mere

sentence or two description wouldn't be giving anything away, and you would

have had to provide that to sell it anyway.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.