[od-discuss] Proposed License - Hacked Apache 2.0

Fri Mar 9 22:54:10 UTC 2012

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 12:53 AM, Andrew Katz <Andrew.Katz at moorcrofts.com> wrote:
>> Why is it called a hardware license? Obviously it could be used for software,
>> non-hardware-design-documentation, databases, etc.
>> Personally I'd rather not promote the idea of more field-specific licenses.
>> Much less problematic in the case of a permissive license, and even less so
>> given the built-in effective dual licensing under Apache 2.0, but I think more
>> confusing than necessary, more splintering of knowledge than necessary,
>> and clearly problematic when non-permissive conditions come into play (of
>> course the other two maybe hardware-specific licenses being discussed
>> elsewhere do have such conditions; obviously same-license ones, but while
>> on this tangent, they probably aren't OKD-compliant due to upstream
>> notification conditions, though to my knowledge such have not been
>> discussed in context of OKD).
>
> It was written specifically for use in a hardware context - but I agree its potential use is broader than that. The name is not fixed, and I am open to calling it anything sensible, but there is a little bit of politics here. Although I personally think its addresses a couple of shortcomings with Apache 2.0 itself, I don't want to start hares running here and be open to accusations that I am trying to usurp the Apache software licence here!

I don't think there's much chance of that, but hopefully when/if there
is ever an Apache License 3.0 it'll take some of this back.

I assume (but am not certain) that the Apache License 2.0 text is
under that license; if so is the notice on
http://solderpad.org/licenses/SHL-0.51/ adequate? Maybe this is a
silly question. :)

That brings up another tiny thing that maybe could be improved -- the
Apache site uses the Apache License 2.0 for its content and says so in
the site footer but the appendix of
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 gives no example of doing
so. It seems like it would be very useful to do so, given that
presumably publishing of design documentation on web pages will be a
rather common use case, assuming your license is successful.

You note in http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/commons-law/2012/03/open-source-hardware-announcing-a-new-licence/index.htm
that this license can't contribute to proliferation given that there's
no permissive license designed for hardware. Just a nit, I'm pretty
sure there are several, just not well known, eg
http://web.archive.org/web/20000918053346/http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/LICENSE
but more substantively, "used for" is of more practical importance
than "designed for". AFAICT most "open hardware" projects are using
licenses "designed for" software (one is even using CC-BY-SA, for
better or worse; and yes CC licenses were proliferation in this sense,
given that people had used software licenses for various types of
works before ... and to the extent the outcome is suboptimal, I blame
software license stewards just as much as domain-specific
proliferators) so all the usual legal compatibility and education
reasons for non-proliferation hold, need rather compelling evidence
against.

FWIW, Solderpad already sounds hardware-esque; Solderpad [Public]
License would avoid over-pigeon-holing it.

Mike