Aside on Open Source Hardware Licenses
My Project Goals
I only recently started uploading and sharing my engineering projects online, and therefore ran into the issue of licensing, which I’ve never had to think to hard about before.
My priorities in these projects are as follows:
Personal learning and design improvement: Feedback and collaboration facilitate personal improvement and a better resulting product.
Learning & DIY opportunities for others: My hope is that my projects can be both useful and informative for the people making them: a learning experience in it’s creation and something that can be used to enable more advanced learning in the future.
Promote open source hardware & communal knowledge: Open source hardware is relatively rare, but is the most repairable, and environmentally-friendly way to distribute hardware.
I view DIY-focused projects like this more as an engineering learning opportunity than a utilitarian final project.
Engineering equipment development ‘flywheel’ with experience and tools from projects being used to make future projects better.
Table enumerating license types from the Wikipedia page on copyleft
My personal high level evaluations of popular licenses that allow derivation and revoke designer liability
The License Alternatives
There’s a lot of licenses out there: my bare minimum requirements were to revoke liability, allow derivation, and require attribution in some form. Among the remaining options, I categorized them by two criteria.
Target media: licenses designed to protect art and code have language to protect copyrightable aspects, while dedicated hardware licenses are designed to interact with patents.
License Type: Permissive licenses allow broad use of the material. Copyleft licenses require that derivative works be published under a similar license. Among this, strong copyleft requires open-sourcing any derivative, while weak copyleft only requires open-sourcing edited derivatives (think of COTS parts or software libraries). Restrictive licenses significantly hamper usability (think CC BY NC ND) so I didn’t explore any.
To try and wrap my head around them, I listed them out, and after researching, tried to rank them based on 3 criteria.
How well they promote interaction: how easy to comply with, unintimidating, and popular they are
How well they promote Open-Sourcing: copyleft promotes open-sourcing derivatives
How well they protect the hardware IP: for valuable projects it’s important to protect against patent-trolling
Overall, popular & permissive licenses are the easiest to interact with, while copyleft licenses do the best at promoting Open-Source Hardware (since it’s required of all derivatives).
Evaluation: GPL v3 & CERN OHL
My two favorite licenses coming out of this are the GPL v3 and CERN-OHL.
GPL v3 is the popular copyleft license. It’s popularity and simple language mean that it’s rather unintimidating, and serves well at promoting open-sourcing of derivatives. It’s downside is it doesn’t protect hardware well at all, as software is legally considered ‘creative work’ while mechanical designs are classified by patentable IP. I’ll be using this GPL v3 license for quick projects where I’m more focused on ease of use than I am about IP.
CERN OHL is a much more robust license for hardware, while still allowing copyleft provisions. The CERN OHL builds a robust legal framework for hardware licensing, providing patent, copyright, design rights, database rights, and more. However, it’s still much more difficult for users to comply with (pdf user manual as an example), having stipulations physical license notices, license registration, and more. This increased legal barriers for derivation makes it completely overkill for designs that don’t have significant design time and patentable IP behind them. If I ever release a project with unique IP, related patent, or more than 1k design hours, it will likely be under this license. *coughcoughswervedrivecarcoughcough*’
For now, my open-source projects are available on my github, please check them out and use them as you will!