Zeo Developer Terms of Use

[Chad Joan]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:53 PM, David Woolley
<forums at david-woolley.me.uk>wrote:

> ...
>
>
>> The thing to think about here is that by releasing a program under the
>> GPL with a linking exception, it seems to me that what you are
>> encouraging is for someone to come up with ways to take your program
>> and replace the closed-source libraries eventually with open source
>> ones.  Zeo will probably never do this, of course.
>>
>
> And they will probably never release the programming model for the
> hardware.
>
>
>>
>>  --
> David Woolley
> Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
> RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
> that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
>

One of the funny things in all of this is that the library I actually care
about using *is* open sourced.  It's written in python code that abstracts
the serial communications with the Zeo unit.  There is no static linking
AFAIK; python code is interpreted and compiled lazily and linked as needed.
The only exception is if I bundle everything into an executable with
something like this <http://www.pyinstaller.org/>, which I do kind of want
to do.  I think the Data Decoder is also completely open source, though
written in Java code.  I don't know or care yet about the web API.  Never
would I be linking against binaries, just Zeo licensed code.

The binary stuff is in the Zeo hardware unit itself.  That rests on the
other side of a serial connection.  As David says, this is something they
probably won't release.  (Not unless they decide to monetize off of hardware
and higher-level data analysis instead, like sleep theory expertise.)

While I can see the Zeo folks wanting to monetize the web API, I think they
are just covering their asses with the Data Decoder and Raw Data Library.
Sure, *maybe* they intend to pull the rug out from under us later, but that
seems terribly awkward given the ease by which it could be circumvented
using everything that's already been given.  That's because the Zeo's serial
communication spec is now public
knowledge<http://zeorawdata.sourceforge.net/api.html#api>.
I think that all someone would need to do is write another Raw Data Library
in a clean room and release that under GPL/LGPL/Boost/etc..

- Chad
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