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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?"
Nothing to see here.
It doesn't matter very much which license is used - therefore there is no "best license". The people who did the work chose the license, as is their right. If they thought a different license was better, they would have chosen a different one.
The license only matters when you mix material with different licenses. I cannot quite see how this would apply for example to a h.264 decoder. The best anyone can do is respect the authors and stay with their license.
You can't copyright a hardware design (that's what patents are for). You could copyright a circuit board layout, or a schematic (the graphic, not the concept), but it's pretty easy for someone to redo either.
What's the problem you're trying to solve?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Public Domain.
Well, it depends on your motivation. If you want your designs used as widely as possible, go with Public Domain or a BSD style license.
However, this allows others to take your work & extend it without releasing the improvements back to the community (a good example of this is Apple's treatment of Darwin)
If you want to ensure that any improvements to your hardware design remain open, go with the GPL.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The FSF are responsible for the GPL and know it well so that is why they list that and not the others. It is not their purpose to list other people's stuff. The answer is to read the other licences and see what fits.
OpenCores does not mention the MIT license because in a nutshell it IS the BSD license. In fact many schools release code under a generally renamed BSD license with their schools name on it.
For Example: The LLVM is released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License which can be found here. Reading through it is very similiar to the BSD license
And Here is the MIT License... Look familiar?
The MIT License
Copyright (c)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Not that I agree with this idea, but Communism put forth by Marx says that the people should own the means to manufacture.
When it comes to software, one can write, and many can gain. Considering that we have free OSes, free compilers, and free testing kits says that the people DO have the means now. That there is communism, as according to Karl Marx. No rights are trampled on, nobody thrown in gulags. In fact, the FSF tries to keep a civil tone when dealing with GPL-breaking companies and approach compliance with a stern, but nice tone.
When this idea comes to hardware (and other objects) we have the problem... How do we take instructions to make an X so that we can all use them? We need a lot of industrial equipment (compilers, if you will) that take an idea and instructions to a real tangible object. How much does an injection molder cost? How much does metal presses cost? How much do chip fabs cost?
Yeah, they're that expensive. A company will pay millions per machine that may have one purpose, and will have 3 of these machines for their business. They then ship their output to another company for more processing and machining, as they were just one step through the industrial process.
Communism work when the means of production is free, and modification is free. It does not work when there is many vertical industries with multi-millions in equipment that the citizens do not have access to.
In that case, the most sensible approach is to entice companies to take our schematics and take them through production. They will have high profits at first, but competition via no barriers of entry (no patents or copyright on said work) will allow multiple entrants. This idea hinges that as many compete, profits approach cost. The end result: we people benefit.
There is a terminology problem in referring to FPGA configurations as "Hardware." An FPGA core is a different sort of entity from Hardware or Software; the term Configware is increasingly popular term for it. The description of the algorithm should be abstracted from the metal executing a particular manifestation of the algorithm and so the licensing issues for configware are no different than licensing issues for software. Similar to issues in the traditional software world, a stumbling block for FPGA adoption is integrating proprietary cores with open source components. An interesting and difficult problem is making compilers from various linguistic paradigms to execution models appropriate for FPGA hardware or instruction stream processors. Bluespec is an example of a language that can compile to C and Verilog.
Here's the Darwin source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ You are free to use it as you wish,
I don't see the iPhone Darwin source there.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.