[cc-community] Open Hardware Licence

Alan Cox alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Wed May 6 10:49:51 EDT 2009


> Getting straight to the point I have design for an energy
> saving lighting system which has possibilities of saving up to 80% of current incandescent
> systems.

Standard household incandescent bulbs aren't actually obtainable in the
UK so my comments are entirely hypothetical.

> 1. Hopefully someone will tell me that I am wrong in my assumption that the
> real world doesn't lend itself to the ideology of open source hardware.
> Copyleft has problems with the norm of patent and even though there are a small
> amount of open source hardware projects their validity is still to be tested.

In the free software world some work has been done on combining GPL and
patent right grants (see for example the Red Hat patent promise).

In a sense this is all a warm up to what happens when replicators meet
the law. In actual fact a lot of it is already here but the law hasn't
even noticed. I'm not sure anyone knows what happens if someone publishes
open source milling machine instructions for a DIY AK47 rifle, or who
commits what offence if you download it from the net without
realising what it is then run it and end up producing armaments without a
licence. Who supplied what to whom ;)

http://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2009/04/copyright_encounters_of_the_th.html

(and indeed future questions like crash safety of print your own
cars ....)

> 2. As I say I am unsure of copyleft to specific hardware layouts, but
> references to the network architecture in terms of implementation and layout
> are more likely?

> 3. Firmware of master and slave nodes; Software no problem.

To a huge extent the software of a network system isn't the interesting
bit. TCP/IP doens't work because everyone shared the firmware and network
stack (although the BSD implementation certainly made take up go faster).
It worked because the protocol was patent-free, *simple* and open.

> dislike to corporate IP but the main thing is that an open source collaborative
> effort could accelerate a common standard in a confused arena. Just to kick-start
> the idea is of importance and I would greatly appreciate any help.

Have you talked to Harald Welte at all ? He's done stuff like 

http://www.openpcd.org/

Alan


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