[cc-community] Open Hardware Licence
Alan Cox
alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Sun May 10 15:49:12 EDT 2009
> copyleft license to create free works. What public domain style
> licenses might do is cause a certain subset of people from
> contributing to your project because they want copyleft.
Hardly likely. They will just put their additions under a copyleft type
licence and protect their own changes (including protecting them from the
original author). Apache is a classic software example showing this kind
of very loose licensing model can work.
> GNU-GPL won't provide copyleft protection
> if the source code ends up in an ASIC.
You really don't seem keen to acknowledge the fact that chip layouts are
copyrightable works.
> That's the simple fact. It isn't faith.
If there is no caselaw it is not a fact.
> And it was confirmed to me by FSF via email
> a year or two ago when I was looking into
> an open hardware license.
I'm not convinced the FSF is right. It would take a lawyer to find out
however, and a lawyer is where people should go for advice not this list.
Having talked to several it appears a lot more murky than you make out.
The other alternative for copyleft type behaviour on novel hardware is
patents - because they can be made to work like the GPL (in fact they
reach further than copyright licences can and into areas that the FSF can
only wish they could do in software copyright).
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