The concepts behind Argot has been under consideration for a patent over the last six years. After some deliberation I have decided to abandon the patent and change the way Argot is released. In the coming weeks the Argot source code will be released under a BSD style license. This completely removes the shackles of patents and licensing which I believe may have been holding Argot back. This is a major change to the way Argot is released and will hopefully pave the way for it to grow and improve.
A major motivation for removing the patent and license is timing. The M2M (Machine to Machine) market is evolving and growing quickly at the moment. The concept of the Internet of Things (IOT) is becoming the next big thing and projects like Contiki are gaining momentum. For Argot to have any chance of being accepted, it needs a simple compatible license. Argot also needs to be tested in the market and possibly evolve to the meet the needs of the market. It can't do that sitting on the shelf. Argot is designed to meet the needs of the embedded and M2M market; small light weight data encoding with data type versioning built-in. No other technology can provide the ability to embed the full meta description of a protocol in as little as 4kb of memory. This is the right time for Argot to be in the market and tested fully.
If you're a developer or technologist of any sort that had been turned off Argot in the past, because of the wrong license or patents, please, look again safe in the knowledge that the code is free from restrictions. In fact, one of the consolations of having an abandoned patent is that you know that its safe from other patents getting in the way in the future; prior art is proven back to 2003. If you like what you see, or think it's climbing the right mountain please get involved or even develop your own implementation.
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