Numenta Blog
Welcome to the Numenta Blog
Donna Dubinsky, CEO
3/5/07
Welcome to the Numenta blog. You will see a variety of articles in this blog from different members of the Numenta team. We won’t promise a specific schedule, but rather we will post entries as thoughts occur to us that are worth sharing. You may see us write blog entries about work within the developer community as well.
Editor's Note: We've recently gone through an update of our licensing strategy. However, to maintain the integrity of this blog, we've highlighted the text that is now out of date. Please visit our licensing page for more up-to-date information.
For this first entry, I thought I would explain in “plain English” what we are trying to accomplish in the licenses for the Research Release. I know that every developer will carefully read the license agreements themselves (and, of course, my lawyers insist I tell you that you MUST read the licenses for the legalities rather than rely on this blog entry), but I also thought it would be helpful to share some of our thinking behind the licenses. By the way, I’m not going to talk about what we’re trying to accomplish with this release at a higher level because Jeff has addressed that question here: Jeff's Release Note.
Let’s talk about the licenses. We separated the technology into three components for licensing and for downloading. The reason behind this complexity is that the licenses do have some differences, and because we felt that different people would be interested in different parts of the technology. I’d like to explain in a little more detail.
The first package contains the runtime engine (object code), tools (a Python based framework), and the examples (Python source code). We recommend downloading this package as your first step in exploring NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing). You should use our examples as a starting point for experimentation.
You will be required to accept a “click-through” license in order to initiate the download. As an overview, the platform license allows experimentation but not deployment, it does not require any payment from you, and it puts no support obligations on us. Although we will not provide direct technical support, be sure to explore our web site and regularly visit our forums and wikis. We intend to be active in monitoring and contributing to the community, giving web-based seminars, and providing training material. Finally, from an intellectual property perspective, while Numenta owns the platform itself, you own any application that you have developed on top of the platform.
Why do we offer you a license without deployment rights? Well, although we are very excited about the ultimate applications of this technology, we feel it is too early to expect commercial class applications. We do not want to mislead you as to the state of the technology.
Perhaps we’re wrong! If you find yourself closer to a commercial application than we expect, let us know. We promise that we’ll speed up our commercial licensing plans!!
We have had many questions about our expected pricing strategy. Understandably, developers do not want to invest time in learning and working on a platform which might not be accessible from a pricing standpoint. In lieu of having a completed pricing structure, let me just give you our pricing philosophy. In brief, for the runtime platform, we expect to have a capacity based pricing system. This structure will allow you to start working with the platform at a low cost, and only pay more if you have solved a large problem. For the tools and algorithms source code, we expect to have a pricing structure that is similar to comparable software products. We will share details of our pricing structure as we get closer to commercial deployment.
In order to provide significant developer access to our platform, we are offering source code to two major components: the tools and the algorithms. As such, the second software package available is the platform tools (C++ and Python source) for network configuration, session management, and analysis/debugging. It is not essential to download this package to experiment with NuPIC. This package was created for those developers who have ideas on how to improve the tools, or who need to modify the tools in order to better support their problem. In addition, some developers may just want to reference the source code to understand better what the platform is doing.
This license differs from the runtime license in a significant way in that it permits commercial deployment of derivatives, as long as the derivative work runs on the Numenta Platform. In other words, we encourage you to create new and better versions of our tools, and to make them available (either for charge or not) to other developers in the community.
The third software package contains the learning algorithms (C++ source code) and the Node Plugin API. The Node Plugin API allows developer access to the innards of the nodes themselves. There are two reasons why you might be interested in this license. First, while we expect that most developers would prefer to leave the algorithms as a “black box”, and our platform is structured to allow that, a small number of developers may want to extend our algorithms or to create new algorithms, and we are excited to enable this effort. Second, developers who are interested in creating new types of sensors or effectors will want to take this license in order to get essential API information.
The algorithms license is similar to the tools license in that it gives the developer the right to commercialize derivative work as long as it runs on the Numenta Platform. If you come up with a great new learning algorithm, we hope you will offer it to the rest of the community, whether free or for a fee.
The algorithms license differs from the platform license and the tools license in that it has a higher confidentiality requirement. While we urge developers to share their comments and work openly on both the runtime engine and the tools, we request that algorithms developers only share their thoughts about our source code with others who have executed the algorithms license. To this end, we have created closed forums for these discussions (Algorithms Forum & Tools Source Forum). Note: You will be unable to access these forums until you download the software and agree to the licenses.
I hope this discussion of the licenses was helpful to you.
