[cc-community] Open Hardware Licence

Alan Cox alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Sun May 10 16:59:05 EDT 2009


> You didn't jump in to answer any question about hardware
> licensing. You jumped in because I didn't worship FSF
> in total idolation like you do.

You are continuing your mad fantasy obsession again. I don't worship the
FSF, I'm not even particularly fond of the them, and as my interest in
Open Hardware is the production of etched brass models with copyrighted
artwork any license that witters about source code and object code is
entirely useless to me.

> point in your mind. You then went on your own pointless
> libertarian ramble about how FSF has been around for many

Oh dear now you really have lost it. A "libertarian ramble". I'm about as
close to libertarian as George Bush was a communist. Feel free to call me
a "postmodernist", some people like to use that for an insult, usually
because they can't cope with long words.

> Gee, Wally, I've only been dealing with the issues around

and now we get to insults.

> Nobody ships a mask. People ship silicon. It still
> isn't a *copyright derivative distribution*, so it still
> isn't protected by something like the GNU-GPL which
> requires a copyright derivative to be distributed
> before copyleft will kick in.

Then your legal advice differs from the advice I've been given - but that
would have been mostly about EU law.

> trigger, OR, (2) use or craft a license like APSL which

Craft clearly as the APSL specifically applies to Apple released code and
Apple trademarks.

> doesn't trigger off of a copyright derivative being
> distributed to trigger the copyleft protection, which means

I've spent a lot of time banging my head against this *exact* brick wall
because I have the same problem with etched brass works. The artwork is
copyrighted. If that artwork then produces a set of pieces for a
functional object (eg a frame or even something complex like compensated
trucks) those pieces so produced are not copyrighted and even an
APSL type licence won't stop someone taking the design if provided under
a copyleft style licence, modifying it and selling parts based upon the
modified design providing they don't publish the modified design -
because they don't "Externally Deploy [their] Modifications". They
apparently externally deploy a work created with the modified work -
which is different.

The licence would have to go a stage further for this to work and try to
restrict various types of private modification even if they were not
published. At that point my lawyer smiles at me and says "you need
contract law to do this" - which is completely useless for any kind of
open licensing model.

Chasing up the creative commons folks got me a "we have no idea, maybe
the cc-community list knows" - which isn't helpful either.

I can't even fudge it - at least in the computing case its usually true
that the software is the actual hard bit so if the software is under a
free licence that works the hardware is kind of irrelevant because its
basically useless without the software "key".

> wouldn't do it. I wrote FSF to ask if they had a license
> that would. At which point they completely missed the
> point and rambled on about "Free" instead of "Open".

No suprise.

They don't seem to be able to answer the rather awkward related question
"If I have a java to VHDL compiler and I compile a GPL app into a chip
then what" (and we have subset Java to VHDL compilers so the question
isn't entirely theoretical any more)

Alan



More information about the cc-community mailing list