[Discuss] Some news from CERN

David A. Mellis dam at mellis.org
Tue Jul 9 15:58:27 UTC 2013


Thanks for the update!

One comment on the license (and apologies if this has been discussed on the
CERN OHL list already): I like the idea of requiring licensees to make
their modifications publicly available (as opposed to explicitly notifying
/ sending them to the original licensor) but the definition of
"documentation location" seems overly vague. For example, "publicly
accessible" sounds like it would include, say, placing a copy of the
modified documentation on a USB key in my local library -- which is
technically accessible to anyone but in practice would be very
inconvenient.

Is there a more specific definition that might make sense here?


On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 8:45 AM, Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch>wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Here are some news from the Open Source Hardware efforts at CERN:
>
>
> CERN Open Hardware Licence
> --------------------------
>
> We are quite close to the publication of version 1.2 of the licence.
> There is a draft [1] open for comments, and discussions in the CERN OHL
> mailing list [2] are steadily converging. Our aim is to publish it
> towards the end of this month. The current draft includes ideas from a
> recent article [3] which was posted here, and the author himself has
> participated in the discussions. Feel free to join the mailing list if
> you would like to participate as well.
>
>
> ICALEPCS Pre-Conference Open Hardware Workshop
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> This is a workshop under the umbrella of ICALEPCS, which is a biennial
> conference on controls and data acquisition for big Physics facilities,
> like particle accelerators, telescopes, etc. We did one in 2011 and it
> was very successful, so we're doing another one in San Francisco in
> October this year. It's very informal. Details can be found in the
> workshop page [4]. Registration [5] is now open, and everyone is very
> welcome. One of the big themes this year will be FOSS tools for
> developing OSHW. Which takes me to...
>
>
> Kicad
> -----
>
> Our contribution to Kicad [6] is now moving forward full-steam, even if
> our steam is limited. We just submitted a new View component [7] for
> review. The aim is to enable Kicad to display complex PCBs without
> significant performance problems. Our test PCB is 12 layers. If this is
> approved, we will move on to a very important work package: the Tool
> Framework [8]. The idea is to make Kicad modular enough so that people
> who want to add functionality to it don't have to touch its guts.
>
> We liaised with CERN's Knowledge Transfer group to start raising funds
> for Kicad development, through the "CERN and Society" initiative [9].
> Our first donation came from Arduino [10], which is of course a great
> honour, and we already put the money to produce code, mostly on
> improving the footprint library table support in the layout editor. I
> now intend to address potential donors in the education sector. If you
> are involved with education and think Kicad could play an important role
> there, please contact me off-list. In fact, please contact me if you
> have any ideas for fund raising! :)
>
> If the fund raising for Kicad proves effective and to the extent my time
> allows, I would like to start a similar effort to fund development for
> the Icarus Verilog simulator [11]. We have contributed to adding some
> VHDL and SystemVerilog support (to the existing Verilog support) in the
> past, with the aim of having a good FOSS tool for mixed-language
> simulation, but there is still quite some work to be done.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Javier
>
> [1] http://www.ohwr.org/documents/264
> [2] http://lists.ohwr.org/sympa/info/cernohl
> [3]
>
> http://jipel.law.nyu.edu/2013/04/three-dimensional-printing-and-open-source-hardware/
> [4] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/ohr-meta/wiki/OHW2013
> [5] http://www.cvent.com/d/6cq5hx
> [6] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki
> [7]
> http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages#3-View-component
> [8]
> http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages#5-Tool-framework
> [9] http://cernandsociety.web.cern.ch/technology/kicad-development
> [10] http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/06/10/arduino-donations-and-values/
> [11] http://iverilog.icarus.com/
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> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
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