[cc-community] Open Hardware Licence

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Thu May 7 11:28:13 EDT 2009


The issues with hardware licensing are explained here:

http://www.greglondon.com/libre/index.htm



The main problem is that most open licenses use
"copyright derivative" combined with "distribution"
to trigger the copyleft aspect of the license.

This doesn't work well with hardware because
hardware vendors don't distribute the
copyright derivative, they distribute hardware.

This means that a vendor can take some open hardware
source code, make modifications and improvements
to it, build an ASIC, distribute the ASIC, and
keep their modifications private.

This "hole" in the license is similar to the issue
with a web host company taking some GPL software,
modifying it, using it on their server, but since
they don't distribute the code, the copyleft aspect
doesn't kick in, and they can keep their modifications
private.

This hole is closed by the Apple Public Source License.
The APSL requires that all modifications trigger
the copyleft aspect, whether the modified code is
distributed or kept local.

It turns out that the APSL can also be used to close
the same hole that occurs with hardware source code.

So, if you want a copyleft license for hardware,
you will probably need to use something like the APSL.

Anything else, and your code is vulnerable to the
private-modification issue. Pretty much any license
other than APSL, when applied to hardware source code,
is like a public domain license. Private modifications
of the source code with distribution of the physical
hardware only means that anyone can make private modifications
and the copyleft aspect of the licence does not protect it.

As for various CC aspects, since the source code is
not distributed, I don't think any of the CC attributes
are activated. i.e. if you make some hardware source code
available under CC-BY, I don't think attribution is required
on the physical hardware because the source code is not
distributed. Same goes for ShareAlike, but SA doesn't require
source code anyway, so it isn't really meant for software
or hardware to begin with. The only attribute that might
kick in is the NonCommercial attribute if you put it in
there, and I say this only because NC is still a little
fuzzy in my mind. I'm not sure when it kicks in. I think
it triggers even if the code is kept private, so NC might
(and I am not a lawywer and this is not legal advice)
protect  your source from commercial use even if the vendor
makes private modifications and only distributes physical
hardware.

If you want copyleft style protection on hardware code
I think you need to use APSL. If you use anything else,
you're pretty much putting it in the public domain
because most licenses don't trigger because the source
code is never distributed by the vendor.







More information about the cc-community mailing list