Licensing

[Russ Nelson]

Hi. I was the Open Source Initiative VP in charge of Licenses for 11 years. Open Source licenses protect the code by restricting the right to copy with copyright permissions. By default, you have no right to copy, but if you comply with the terms of the license (whatever they may be), you can redistribute the work, whether modified or original.

What copyright does not let you do, as you might guess from the "copy" part of copyright, is restrict use of a work. If someone has legally obtained a copy of a work, they can use it any way they want. In particular, people can use your work to create void_switches and sell them.

In order to restrict how people can use the work, you would have to have a patent on using three magnets to create a key with the desired characteristics. The AT&T key which uses two magnets and a spring is a different thing. Only a court could tell you whether your invention infringes on the AT&T key, if indeed they patented it. If there is no patent, or it's expired, then you're home free to patent it yourself. I recommend against doing that, though, because it takes a long time and lots of money and in the end a patent is just permission to sue and a likelihood that you will win.

The worst circumstance would be if somebody has a patent on using three magnets as you have done. I don't even want to think about how awful that would be.