Slashdot Mirror
Best Open Source License For Hardware?
An anonymous reader writes "MIT recently open-sourced some really cool hardware designs, including an H.264 video decoder and an OFDM transceiver, under MIT's open source license (a.k.a. the X11 license). Now, the OpenCores FAQ recommends that people use either the GPL, LGPL, or modified BSD license; they do not mention the MIT license at all. And, according to the Free Software Foundation the GPL license can be used for hardware, but they do not list the LPGL, modified BSD, or MIT licenses as suitable for non-software. Would you or your company use hardware source-released under the MIT license? What's the best license to use for releasing hardware?"
Would anyone care to point out the practical differences between the MIT/X and the modified BSD licenses? Basically, there aren't any, so of course it makes sense for MIT to have used the MIT license.
There is no significant difference between the MIT license and the modified BSD license.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You can also copyright the masks and layouts of the transistors. Board artwork for circuit boards has long been held as copyrightable, and the miniaturized artwork that exists on a CPU is no different. If you look at closeups of dies, you will see a © symbol occasionally, such as on this one.
Program Intellivision!
"The Free Software Foundation has a transparent agenda: GPL at all costs."
Don't spread FUD about the FSF. Their agenda is not the GPL at all costs, it is to promote free software, and those are two different things.
Counterexamples to your claim of "GPL at all costs":
- The FSF plainly says that free software does not require using the GPL [0]
- The FSF plainly says that releasing software under the modified BSD license (or another non-copyleft license) is not wrong [1]
- The FSF does not use the GPL for all of its software, because it hopes that by doing so it will promote free software [2]
[0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
You can always license it under the WTFPL, whose terms are quite simple:
--------
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
--------
I would say that is a relatively free license, and it satisfies your scenario, if it really *is* a problem.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I wrote the section of the OpenCores FAQ that the story refers to so I can give a little background history.
...) it was decided that licenses such as the GPL could be applied. It is still not clear by what legal mechanism a hardware manufacturer can be forced to disclose the "open" portions of a system.
The FAQ answer was the result of an extended discussion on the OpenCores mailing lists about the best license to use. We didn't come up with a definitive answer and the GPL, LGPL, modified BSD recommendation was aimed at reducing license proliferation while giving people a choice between copyleft and non-copyleft. The MIT license was judged to be close enough to the modified BSD license (also noted by OSI) that we could just choose one of them. Reducing proliferation was an issue since people were experimenting with different homebrewed licenses with potential to fragment the community.
Open and Free licensing is still a murky issue for hardware as much of hardware falls outside of copyright. In so far as copyright applies (schematics, bitstreams, source code,
For example say someone builds an integrated circuit using GPLd VHDL from the OpenCores website. The chip might be covered by circuit layout rights but it is questionable whether copyright is applicable. It seems unclear that the GPL can be applied to a chip. A system such as a circuit board is even murkier since it is not covered by circuit layout rights and being a functional system might fall outside copyright (despite manufacturers plastering their boards with the copyright symbol). Any copyright could also be circumvented by rerunning an autorouter with a different seed to generate a different pattern of PCB tracks.
It will be very interesting to see what conclusion Eben Moglen, Mary Lou Jepsen and so on come to now that the OLPC and Pixel Qi have prompted the Free Software community to seriously examine the underpinnings of Free Hardware. A number of years ago Richard Stallman was of the view that Free Hardware was outside the mission of the FSF and freedom for hardware was not relevant since the difficulty of manufacturing was a greater barrier to freedom than the law.
We (that's Sun Microsystems) chose the GPL as the license under which to release everything necessary to make an UltraSPARC T1 (and more recently, T2). We placed it all - RTL, tools, the lot - at OpenSPARC.Net. The license choice was for two main reasons:
While releasing hardware sources under a Free license is a different deal to software, the GPL seems to encourage the same willingness to examine and use the code as it does in software. The mechanisms for community have to be different because of the capital-intensive nature of the processes to use the code. We've still seen people rework it to fit it on FPGAs, create single-core chips for embedding and run university degree courses on it. I remain pretty happy with the license choice we made.