Hi Juergen
I began writing some thoughts before reading through the pdf.. doh!
that looks to be about it! wow great work done there.
regards FSF and CC yes they should be proactive but you
could also expect some support from design and production industries
from around the world for this evolutionary step in creative production
which has parity with the creative license and free software
realisations of these recent years.
what do you estimate the set up costs for the trademark?
I would be keen to hear reactions from the many open hardware projects
you have listed there on the gosh wiki.
top notch
thanks for the cake!
James
Neumann wrote:
Dear fiends and fellows,
as some of you may know, for the past 2 years I have been engaged in trying to
get Open Source Hardware off the groud. Recently I had been at the piksel
festival in Bergen, Norway, to continue with the work me and some other guys
had started at http://www.gosh2009.ca about licensing OSH devices.
As I can tell from my own observations and contacts the topic Open Source Hardware is developing more and more momentum. On the other hand until today there is no applicable way to connect the physical outcome of free open source designs (the devices and objects) to a copyleft license.
Though there are many people out there developing Open Source Hardware already,
licensing ends with the digital design artefacts/documents/files. The reason
for this is the legal construction of copyleft, which is - as of course you
know - based on copyright laws.
The legal adequate for copyright in the physical world would be patents. But patenting is
an expesive, complicated and time consuming process which is in most cases not suitable
for open source hardware developers. So after many talks with various lawyers in Canada,
the US and Europe, we finally seem to have found a valid way to work arround this
problem. The "trick" is a trademark. Please find attached our latest results on
this idea and the process of it's application. [1]
As you can imagine, we would all still be more then happy if we would not have
to form another legal entity for OHANDA, but rather work together with FSF
and/or Creative Commons. We would be very pleased - and so would be most of the
open source hardware developers - if the trademark and process were hosted and
held by the FSF and/or CC.
From all the talks that we had in the past, my impression was though, that FSF
is very strict about limitting its interest to free software. And also CC is
not really too positive so far to get engaged. Though I can understand that of
course, I think that in the longterm it will only make sense to have a broader
view on free IT infstructures and contents as a whole, including content,
sofware, hardware and networking infrastructures.
Therefore I wanted to keep you updated on my latest activities and please you
to support OHANDA to get FSF and/or CC to support/adopt our approach. We would
all be more than happy to work together with either or both of them to get a
copyleft like licensing process off the ground for open hardware designs,
devices and products.
Curious about your comments!
Very kindly,
Juergen
[1] http://www.gosh2009.ca/wiki/index.php/File:Ohanda_piksel.pdf
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