A dedicated licence for open-source hardware: CERN OHL approved by OSI (opens in new tab)

I would pay money to watch some naive FOSS enthusiast trying to pitch to a DARPA PM about technology.

> I always used Creative commons for hardware, is CC in its variations not good enough for hardware?

It's a poor fit. The Creative Commons licenses are primarily designed to be applied to artistic works, like literature, photographs, or music. It's unclear how some parts of those licenses would apply to hardware designs or software programs; indeed, Creative Commons discourages the use of their licenses for software.

CC is geared more toward content/documents. People can and do use it for hardware, but it's not a great fit. In the article they talk about some of the challenges like the building blocks of most electronic designs (i.e. chips, passives and other components) not being things that can realistically be covered in the license. And the fact that a lot of the more interesting 'hardware' actually needs to include both hardware and software (i.e. firmware). I'm sure patents are another area that are at least a bit different with open hardware since it's almost impossible to source a microprocessor, for example, that isn't covered by numerous patents.

If you can't afford an international team of IP lawyers to actually enforce your rights, then your license really isn't anything more than a polite explanation of what people should and shouldn't do with your work.

Creative Commons and its variants excel in this regard - anyone acting in good faith knows exactly what your boundaries are and they're explained clearly on the website.

CERN's OHL, on the other hand, is a little bit more opaque and less well understood.

RTFM/from the article...

>CERN ended up with three variants. There is a strong reciprocal licence (CERN-OHL-S), which is for designs that remain free along with all their derivatives, a copyleft principle similar to GPL.

>There is a weak reciprocal licence where the design can be used as a component in other designs without the whole becoming open source, but if the design of the component is modified, that must be shared back (CERN-OHL-W). And there is a permissive licence, CERN-OHL-P, which lets users mix the design freely with proprietary designs provided it is acknowledged, similar to Apache 2.0 in the software world.

Depending on your target market, open-sourcing your hardware makes a lot of sense. I open-sourced my commercial USB oscilloscope design (https://github.com/EspoTek/Labrador) after doing a bit of research into boards targeted at electronics hobbyists and crowdfunded by individuals or small teams.

Invariably, a community didn't form around the closed-source boards and they died.

A lot of people asked me what I'm doing to protect my IP from being "stolen". The most effective solution I've found so far is efficient logistics. I take advantage of 3PL companies in Shenzhen, as well as Amazon FBA in the US (and Europe soon) to make sure that it's easy for customers anywhere in the world to buy the product.

So far, I've sold close to 10k units and the the only clones I've seen were made by a student in Iran for personal use.

There is a lot of open hardware, also a lot published by private companies.

See e.g.

https://ohwr.org/, https://opencores.org/

or https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1_fpga https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1