1. Workshop IPR
January 12, 2010
Dirk Frigne
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2. Agenda
• The company
– Just to introduce myself
• The product
– this is what we want to protect
• The services
– this is what we want to sell
• IPR strategy
– now and in the in the future
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3. Geosparc – the Compagnie
Started January 2009
Geosparc commercially supports Geomajas,
the open source GIS application
framework, coupling the innovation of
open source with the reliability of a true
enterprise-class platform
Geomajas is the extensible open source
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4. The product
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5. The product
More details http://www.geomajas.org
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6. the services
• Consultancy
• Service Level Agreements (SLA)
• Commercial license (tx to IPR)
• OEM license (tx to IPR)
• Premium applications (tx to IPR)
• More details
http://www.geosparc.com
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7. Geosparc
Geosparc bought the IPR of Geomajas from
the company who created it + the
engineers to continue the research and
development
Grow from 3 to 8 persons in first year
- marcom expertise
- operational expertise
7 business development & sales
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8. Open Source and IP Strategy1
• Publication since 2006 (first code
samples)
– The internet is a 'public registry'
– Claim that we are the owner (ohloh.net)
– Published a presentation and some
artikels
• Use a 'strong' licence
– Affero GNU Public License (AGPL)
• Product built on top of 'open' licenses
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(LGPL)

9. Open Source and IP Strategy1
• IPR protected by Contributor License
Agreement (CLA)
– All individual contributors (partners,
community) sign CLA
– Partners and key users form the
community
• Protection of the Geosparc and geGIS
brand
• Active monitoring of copyright and
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source of code

10. Open Source and IP Strategy1
• Freedom to operate
– There was no solution in OSS world
• Visiting the most important events
– There was no solution in proprietary
world
• As a consutlant, I could do some
research.
• The risk of forking ...
– Calculated risk
10 – Good open source behavior (PSC)

11. Alternatives
• Software is difficult to protect with patent
protection
– OSS can be a solution in some cases:
• Software for business market
• Server component
• Configuration services possible
• Extensions and software development
possible
• Combination of software and HW: patent
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protection can be an alternative

12. Questions
• Thank you for your attention
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