Wow! Dan, you have certainly given an impressive display of encyclopedic thinking. You've hit on everything! The hallmark of a great engineer!
One little tiny minor point from me: > = A copyright policy. Some considerations: > > - ability to order proprietary boards, this shouldn't be a problem > > - what about selling a proprietary layout? pcb embeds the footprint > in the .pcb file so can I offer a .pcb file for sale to someone if the > footprints are GPL? Probably not. > > - desire to promote free footprint libraries to work with our free > layout tool To this I would add: - To make any copyright policy possible, footprints need to enable comments, and the comments need to be preserved when the footprints are written into the .pcb file. That way, you can write the copyright license directly into the footprint, and have it propagate through the .pcb file. BTW: Marvin Dickens is right (IMHO) -- footprints are similar to the GNU font exception. Here's what the GNU language would look like for footprints (as copied from the GNU page linked by Marvin): As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this footprint, and embed this footprint or unaltered portions of this footprint into the document, this footprint does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this footprint, you may extend this exception to your version of the footprint, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. The same desire for embeddable comments extends to .sch symbols also. Stuart
