Re: Hardware license

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Rich Walker <rw@shadow.org.uk> wrote:
> Terry Hancock <hancock@anansispaceworks.com> writes:
> 
> > On Tuesday 26 November 2002 01:59 pm, Rich Walker wrote:
> > > We've been putting together some robot-related software and hardware. We
> > > want to release this with a DFSG-compliant license set. For the
> > > software, GPL, no problems. For the hardware we propose to include .pcb
> > > files for pcb, .sch files for gschem, and .asm files for the PIC
> > > firmware. What licenses are appropriate for hardware releases?
> > 
> > The LART license is probably required reading on this subject ;-)
> > 
> > http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/LICENSE

This is pretty much the same as the BSD license.  You suggested that
you wanted to copyleft your work, so it may not work for you.  It is
certainly DFSG-free.

> Yes; I'm currently looking at that and the OpenIPCore license.
> 
> http://www.opencores.org/OIPC/OHGPL.shtml. 
> 
> Are these both compliant licenses?

The OpenIPCore license is a more of a copyleft, so you'll probably be
happier with it.  Looking through the license, it looks mostly ok.
The only thing that caught my eye is section 5

  5. Any modification of this hardware design or any derivative work
     from it should be documented by providing list of changes,
     reasons behind the changes and the date of change.

Requiring people to list the _reasons_ for a change is somewhere
closer to the edge of DFSG-free than I'd like.  It might be fine with
it, but it'd be better to just change it to

  5. Any modification of this hardware design or any derivative work
     from it should be documented by providing a list and the date of
     the change.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu