The Structure
Two entities.
One mission.
The same model that governs Linux, Eclipse, and Apache. A trade foundation holds the code and IP. A commercial company provides services. The code belongs to the community. The expertise is available for hire.
FrogNet Foundation 501(c)(6) trade organization — holds code and patents.
The Foundation holds the intellectual property — the code, the patents, and the protocol specifications. It governs the open source project, manages contributions, and ensures the technology remains available to everyone.
The four provisional patents being filed are defensive. They exist to prevent bad actors from patenting FrogNet's core innovations and blocking the community from using them. The Foundation owns them on behalf of the community.
Patent assertion policy: The Foundation's patents will be asserted only defensively, and only in response to patent aggression against users of FrogNet or its derivatives. This policy will be written into the Foundation's governing documents before the first patent issues. The Twitter Innovator's Patent Agreement is the model.
Revenue: membership dues from organizations that want a voice in governance and preferred access to the project roadmap.
Fawcett Innovations, LLC Commercial services — consulting, training, certification.
Fawcett Innovations provides consulting, training, and certification on the FrogNet platform. The code is free. The expertise is available for organizations that need help deploying, integrating, or extending it.
This is the same relationship Red Hat has with Linux, or Canonical with Ubuntu. The platform is open. The services company helps you use it in production.
Services: deployment consulting, architecture review, custom integration, training programs, and certification for engineers working with the platform.
The patents Nine patentable inventions. Four highest-priority filing first.
The FrogNet platform includes nine distinct patentable inventions identified through architectural review. All patents will be filed in the Foundation's name and asserted only defensively. The four highest-priority inventions will be filed first as provisional patents.
1. BLDC-1 Semantic Compression with SAME/DIFF/FULL state machine, HMAC-keyed cache identity, and RTT-based mode switching. The compression mechanism that produces 93.8% bandwidth reduction on real HTTP traffic. Highest commercial value — therefore highest defensive priority. Somebody will independently reinvent this within the next few years if it is not established as prior art.
2. Floating Transient Database with deterministic host election. Single authoritative database that moves to the highest-IP node on every topology change, with no reconciliation attempt. Rejects distributed consensus as infeasible over degraded links. Counter-intuitive but correct.
3. Transport-Agnostic Ingestion via transient database as integration boundary. External transports (Meshtastic/LoRa, APRS, HF radio, satellite) write JSON records to the transient database. The bridge doesn't need to understand the platform; it writes correctly formatted sensor entries. New transports integrate without modifying the core.
4. Sensor-to-AI-to-Actuator Loop via transient database. ESP32 sensors write state. Local AI hosts read state and write commands. Actuators poll for commands. All through the same shared data layer, with no direct sensor-to-AI or AI-to-actuator connections. The AI doesn't know what a sensor is; it knows what a database row is.
Additional inventions (filed as resources allow, or defensively published through IETF drafts and technical papers): FNW1 wire protocol with sequence reset and HMAC identity; RTT-adaptive proxy mode switching with hysteresis and hold-down; self-forming mesh via multi-strategy discovery (WireGuard state files, kernel route scans, neighbor probes); pond/chorus broker architecture for multi-tenant tunnel management; opportunistic security via Ed25519 signed runonce with TOFU and gossip relay.
The strategy combines filed patents with defensive publication — detailed technical descriptions in public venues (conference talks, Internet-Drafts, archived blog posts) that establish prior art without filing costs. The goal is not to exclude; the goal is to prevent exclusion.
Why this model Proven. Sustainable. Aligned.
The code stays free. The Foundation's charter ensures the codebase remains open source. No single company can close it, fork it proprietary, or restrict access.
Contributors are protected. The Foundation provides the legal structure — contributor license agreements, IP assignment, governance processes.
The business is sustainable. Training, certification, and consulting generate revenue without restricting the technology.
Patents protect the commons. Open Invention Network is the model — patents held in common, asserted only in response to aggression. Nobody can use the FrogNet patents to threaten a contributor or a user.
What opens Everything. The entire codebase.
Core platform: Semantic proxy, semantic daemon, BLDC-1 compression engine, FNW1 wire protocol, tunnel broker, node installer, network discovery, routing.
Application layer: Transient database, REST API, dashboards, sensor integration, actuator control, Meshtastic bridge, node monitoring, compression metrics.
Reference network: The working multi-continent network — configuration, tunnel topology, and operational documentation — as a reference implementation anyone can study and replicate.