[wsfii-discuss] OpenHardware - recent updates

Mon Nov 23 21:01:46 UTC 2009

Dear fiends and fellows,

as some of you may know, for the past 2 years I have been engaged in trying to get Open Source Hardware off the groud. Recently I had been at the piksel festival in Bergen, Norway, to continue with the work me and some other guys had started at http://www.gosh2009.ca about licensing OSH devices.

As I can tell from my own observations and contacts the topic Open Source Hardware is developing more and more momentum. On the other hand until today there is no applicable way to connect the physical outcome of free open source designs (the devices and objects) to a copyleft license. 

Though there are many people out there developing Open Source Hardware already, licensing ends with the digital design artefacts/documents/files. The reason for this is the legal construction of copyleft, which is - as of course you know - based on copyright laws.

The legal adequate for copyright in the physical world would be patents. But patenting is an expesive, complicated and time consuming process which is in most cases not suitable for open source hardware developers. So after many talks with various lawyers in Canada, the US and Europe, we finally seem to have found a valid way to work arround this problem. The "trick" is a trademark. Please find attached our latest results on this idea and the process of it's application. [1]

As you can imagine, we would all still be more then happy if we would not have to form another legal entity for OHANDA, but rather work together with FSF and/or Creative Commons. We would be very pleased - and so would be most of the open source hardware developers - if the trademark and process were hosted and held by the FSF and/or CC.

>From all the talks that we had in the past, my impression was though, that FSF is very strict about limitting its interest to free software. And also CC is not really too positive so far to get engaged. Though I can understand that of course, I think that in the longterm it will only make sense to have a broader view on free IT infstructures and contents as a whole, including content, sofware, hardware and networking infrastructures.

Therefore I wanted to keep you updated on my latest activities and please you to support OHANDA to get FSF and/or CC to support/adopt our approach. We would all be more than happy to work together with either or both of them to get a copyleft like licensing process off the ground for open hardware designs, devices and products.

Curious about your comments!

Very kindly,

Juergen

[1] http://www.gosh2009.ca/wiki/index.php/File:Ohanda_piksel.pdf