Our Position on Intellectual Property

The founders of HeadThere realize that intellectual property law, particularly patent law, generates a lot of controversy among the technology community. We also acknowledge that a tension exists between the goals of patent law and the goals of the open software movement. As such, we feel we must state our official position on these matters.

As a technology startup, a strong patent portfolio helps us fight off potential competitors and makes it easier for us to solicit investments. However, we are mindful of the potential for our patent portfolio to alienate portions of the open source community. Therefore, we intend to follow a policy of granting royalty-free licenses to experimenters and hobbyists.

If you want to build a robot using our ideas and/or our software for your own personal use, we will offer you nothing but support and encouragement. Furthermore, we will avoid filing pure software patents, as we believe they slow the pace of innovation. However, we do intend to vigorously defend our patented technology against commercial competitors.