To qualify for our investment, the solution you aim to get funded by us has to be Open Source or you need to indicate you are willing to place it on an open Open Source license.
We don’t require your whole company or all the technologies you develop to be Open Source, but if your solution you submitted receives our investment, it has to have an Open Source license by month six of our investment period (one year). The UNICEF team has Open Source mentorship that can help the startups in choosing the most appropriate Open Source license.
Please note that solutions that meet all the criteria and are entirely Open Source (from end-to-end; server to app; hardware to software etc.) will be given priority in the selection process.
Using specific examples:
If there is a specific product, such as control software for a rover - that is Open Source, it will meet the criteria. If this product connects to a larger ecosystem that is fully Open Source, then that is the best possible scenario.
If it connects to proprietary hardware, the assessment will look at how independent the Open Source component is. i.e. what kind of applicability it could have if applied to other scenarios. If the dependencies are too great on a single and proprietary hardware element, it will get less traction.
For example, U-Report is a full (server-to-app) Open Source environment. It runs on ‘proprietary’ hardware (i.e. mobile phones), but it runs on any phone because it uses SMS. In this case, a market assessment and tech evaluation were done, and a merging of proprietary and Open Source tools still made the global application possible. The same could be true for UAV software (i.e. image analysis): the Venture Fund could invest in a piece of software created that could work on images from any drone. The hardware would still be proprietary, but the tool we are investing in (and that we will put in the public domain) is open.
The same applies to a mobile app. If an Open Source app connects only to a proprietary server-side backend then the app would not qualify for investment. We wouldn’t be able to reuse it. In this case, the investment can be only for very specific Open Source pieces of code and environment. This is more likely to be successful than a bundle, as we can assess their viability easily.