I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!
EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.
And this is virtually guaranteed to happen before too long, leaving tons of useless technicolor QR codes as monuments to the endeavor.
I don’t know how the company is doing, but I do find it strange how large their team is (based on their website) for a service selling QR codes.
Then again, they do seem to have received government/EU grants, so perhaps they’ll be able to stick around that way. If the company does go down, there’s no reason why they couldn’t release a database of every (last known) data point so you can use the app offline for the codes that have stuck around.
A graceful shutdown is possible, and in my opinion, should be contractually obligated under escrow for a company to receive public funds like this.