[cc-community] Open Hardware Licence

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Wed May 6 18:51:17 EDT 2009


On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Chris Watkins
<chriswaterguy at appropedia.org> wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 14:44, Patrick Godeau <patrick.godeau at free.fr> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Stuart,
>>
>> Maybe you will be interested in the IANG license. It applies to any type
>> of intellectual creation, including hardware.
>>
>> http://iang.info/en/
>
> "Last, this license requires the democratic exercise of the freedoms it
> grants. It allows every person contributing to a creative or economic
> project based on the creation to participate in decisions concerning this
> project."
>
> So IIUC you can't actually do what you want with the work - you have to go
> with a decision made jointly with other contributors? Meaning it's not
> really a *free* license... unless there is a right to fork, in which case
> it's just a "kind of free" license with an pre-determined approach to
> project management.
>
> Does it offer any greater protection for designs of physical objects? I
> couldn't see anything about this, so I'm not sure what advantage it offers
> over a Creative Commons license or other open license.

It looks like IANG is effectively like BY-NC-ND, with an extremely
vague provision for specific commercialization and modifications that
the project decides to allow in a democratic fashion.

Another minor but annoying thing is in the footer -- the license text
itself is apparently "copyleft" but only verbatim copying is allowed.

I guess they chose their name well, because GNU is a lot smarter than
this -- IANG Aint No GNU, indeed.


Mike


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