[Discuss] OSHW Best Practices / Layers of Openness

[Chris Church]

On Feb 28, 2013, at 12:47 PM, Windell H. Oskay wrote:

> 
> Hi Chris,
>  If you have intentionally decided not to share mechanical design files for *part* of your design (for whatever reason), then that seems to put it pretty squarely within the "partially open source" realm.  And, that's totally okay, so long as the labeling reflects it.
> 

Hi Windell,

This appears to leave my earlier question un-addressed: physical parts of our enclosures are part of our trade dress, must I give the full right to reproduce our trade dress (which I would be doing if I shared the machining files under CC for our enclosures) to claim my electronics are open-source?  

At what point in the product does the barrier between "must be shared," and "ok to not be shared," occur?   Can we rightfully say there is a barrier at the component level (no need to have hardware design files for the uC, a transistor, etc.) but not one at the packaging level?  I ask this because it is a point we will have to rectify if we are to create distinctions between "open-source" and "partially open-source."

Thanks,
Chris