Hi Patrick, This is an incomplete reply... Patrick McNamara wrote:
I would also like the board to oversee some more "press" related items. We need to define "Open Source Hardware" and "Open Documentation Hardware". I personally think that we need to put together an GPLish license specifically for Open Source Hardware (whatever that is).
I have my doubts about this because the Open Cores project went through this process a few years ago. They originally had a license they called the "Open Hardware General Public License" (OHGPL), but after messing with this for awhile, they concluded it was smarter to just use the standard GNU GPL. Not that I have any objections to repeating that process, but it is not an untraveled road, and I suspect we'd wind up in the same place. ;-) Open Cores removed the OHGPL from their site, but I have a copy: http://x.narya.net/static/terry/ohgpl.html (temporary link) It does have some interesting ideas in it. Another possibility would be to go with a certfication mark, like what the OSI does for open source software. That would have the advantage that it wouldn't have to be limited to the license on the source files. It might be possible to have much stricter requirements to be able to use the certified mark, while not creating a bind on the licensing through incompatibility) which is, I think, what bothered the Open Cores people about the OHGPL. For example, there's the question as to whether shipping a device manufacture from a GPL design constitutes "distribution of an executable". It's debatable whether this invokes the copyleft, requiring the distributor to make the source code available. Also, what happens when you plug a GPL'd hardware card into a proprietary PC. Can you sell it? Or do you have to provide "source" for the entire PC (because it is a "derivative or combined work" -- this makes as much sense as the application of copyleft to dynamically-linked libraries!). Where the GPL is vague like this, you could make solid requirements for the use of a certification mark. The mark would then mean not only that the license was compatible, but also that the company was behaving according to the "good citizen rules" of open hardware. You can afford to be tighter about these, because the company isn't legally bound by these rules -- they just have to follow them to get your approval. In other words, it's a reputation issue rather than a legal one. The OHGPL might be a good starting point for establishing such standards of behavior. Of course, it's probably worth noting that the GPL won't be what it used to be after this year is up, and I suspect the whole DRM-clause issue will be a pretty flaming hot topic amongst hardware developers. ;-) Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
