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Bruce Perens On Problems With the Open Hardware Model (arvideonews.com)
Bruce Perens writes: At the TAPR conference this year, I did a talk on why Open Hardware licenses don't actually work, and how it would actually hurt us if they did. I'm not saying you should stop making Open Hardware, I just want to make sure you don't assume the license works better than it actually does. Also, I explain why my latest project is 100% Open Source but the hardware design is more restrictively licensed than the Open Hardware Definition would allow. The video is here. There's a long prelude of talk about Amateur Radio stuff before the Open Hardware part. But you'll probably find it interesting. Gary didn't succeed with the Kickstarter to fund recording the entire conference this year, but he made the trip and recorded it with a multi-camera shoot anyway, at significant personal expense. If you like the video, please help cover his expenses. Even $1 would help.
Your open source software needs to be compiled to run on the hardware. If you and I have the same hardware, we can share a compiler. If you tweak Chip A to have features 1 and 2 while I tweak Chip A to have features 3 and 4, one of a few things happens. We could just not use those features on software we both use. We could fork the compiler. We could try to work out dynamically adjusting the compilation for our feature sets. That's all fine, even as rough as that last one starts to be. But then we have to consider the 18 other variations among our group of 20 installations using Chip A variants.
All this goes more or less smoothly until some well-meaning party comes along with Chip A.1 that does 95% of what Chip A does, but a different way, and then re-expands the additional features their own direction. Then the cycle starts over. Meanwhile, we're struggling to maintain compatibility across Chip A, and since A.1 isn't too much incompatible we decide one compiler should work for both. Then along comes A.2 two weeks later...
So, yeah, information does want to be free. Platforms also want a target that while not entirely stationary can at least have some chance to adapt to the levels beneath them. Some licenses allow you to completely change a work and keep calling it the same thing. With open hardware changing the underlying implementation is fine. If you change the instruction set or change side effects of one instruction being issued after another for any pair of instructions then you've forked the entire environment that sits on top.
TL;DR: It's not that some sort of open license won't work for hardware. It's that it has to be a carefully worded license that fully considers how hardware is different from software.
Who is Bruce Perens? And why should I care what he thinks about open hardware?
Bruce Perens created the definition of Open Source and spearheaded the Open Source Initiative.
He created BusyBox which is used on pretty much all embedded linux distribution and was Debian Project Leader at some point in the 90s. He also draft the Debian Social Contract.
In other words, he is kind of a prioneer in open source and spent quite a bit of time thinking through the implications of open sourcing. Therefore, I usually consider him having opinions worth listening too when he speaks about open/close source and licenses in general.
In no case he says that having open hardware is a bad thing. He is discussing how we should approach the problem to make the community most efficient and how licensing models for hardware can achieve the properties that we want in open hardware.
Who is Bruce Perens? And why should I care what he thinks about open hardware?
He's the digital equivalent of a panhandler. He submits a story no one is interested in and then asks people to send him money.
The poster you're replying to, "mr_mischef", did not summarize my talk. He just wrote jibberish. The name of the poster might have been a clue :-) The slides are here.
Bruce Perens.
No, an architect's work can be copyrighted because it is artistic in nature, even if the underlying function of a home is functional. The artist, however, can not copyright the functional elements, for example he can not copyright the concept of a bedroom and prevent others from making one. He could, however, patent the function of a new room.
Schematics are judged to be entirely functional and you can't successfully assert copyright on them.
You can also only copyright some parts of software that are artistic rather than functional, see the Wikipedia page on Computer Associates Inc. vs. Altai for an explanation.
Bruce Perens.