[Discuss] licensing with some exclusivity in hardware

Wed Jun 29 13:07:21 UTC 2016

Hi Wouter,

I’m really struggling to see the advantage for the commons/community of having an NC open source licence.  It essentially says, we are very happy for the community to act as free R&D for us, but we don’t want a commercial ecosystem around our products.  It’s literally the ifixit model of open source - here’s the information you need to repair the product you bought.  That’s OK as a model, but it’s a long way from the Arduino approach.  In this respect it’s more like source code you can look at but not distribute.   

Is it effective?  I doubt it.  Very hard to prove that a physical copy has not been reverse engineered.  

What’s more important is provenance (where did the product come from, who is responsible for it) which is partially solved by the trademark approach.

I’m involved with for-profit and social enterprises in different countries, and it would be almost impossible to even define a license, let alone enforce it, that tried to cater for the multiple entity types that exist around the world.  For example, is a for-profit B-Corp a social enterprise?  

What’s wrong with making profit anyway?  Lulzbot seem to be doing the right things and I’m pretty sure they are for-profit.  And trying to define worker-owned enterprises is fraught with danger.  In a startup, everyone at the beginning has shares.  Does that mean they are worker owned?  I would say yes.  But if the license stops the minute they get investment from a non-worker, how do they scale?   What if I’m making a profit by helping refugees start businesses around the world?

I’ve had some discussions with the open hardware group at CERN, and they seem to favour a transactional approach, where a type of contract is the only thing that gives  other players the right to use the design.  Then you can consider usage limitations.  But again, how would you enforce these?  What if someone built a smart gun aiming system using an Arduino?  Is that the fault of Arduino for not having a license limitation that prevents the use in weapons?  What if only SWAT teams use it to take out terrorists?  These sort of ethical discussions are going on around self-driving cars right now.  I doubt we want to make everyone who’s thinking about using open source hardware consider these.  

Personally, I’d be much more concerned with ensuring that license terms can be defined that prevent the privatisation of open source products and ecosystems intended for the benefit of all / the commons.  Trying to use international law to impose politics rarely ends well.  You cannot impose collaboration, you can only invite and enable.  

Where I agree deeply with my colleagues in the Open Source Hardware Association is that we need some clear definitions of which things are really open source - in that business ecosystems can spring up around them - and which ones are really look-but-don't-touch, where individuals can repair or act as free R&D, but cannot create opportunities for themselves.  The two are very different.  Interestingly, there are very few examples of the latter in the open source software world.  

Best Regards,

Paul 

Paul Bristow
T  +33 (0)4 50 59 07 83

panglosslabs.org <http://panglosslabs.org/> - The open innovation lab for Grand Genève

> On 29 Jun 2016, at 13:07 , Wouter Tebbens <wouter at freeknowledge.eu> wrote:
> 
> Dear OSHW community,
> 
> for an EC commissioned research, as well as for some makers interested
> in open, but not completely free licensing I'm exploring the following
> cases.
> 
> 1) How effective is the Creative Commons "NC" clause in designs on the
> restriction of commercial activity with the hardware build with those
> designs? Take the case of the Ultimaker 3D printer: they claim to be
> "open source", [1], but their designs are under the CC BY-NC-SA license,
> [2]. Now I'm not bringing this up for discussing whether using the "open
> source" term is appropriate, but to check whether the Non-Commercial
> clause over the design has any relevant effect on commercial activity
> over machines built based on that design.
> 
> It is clear that the copyright applies to the design and can be uphold
> in court, but it is less clear that that same copyright conditions the
> use of the physical objects made ussing that design. In fact, this is
> one of the reasons why we are developing the OSHW certification program,
> which uses trademark protection to condition its use on physical
> products. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> If this is true, the exclusive right of Commercial usage that the
> Ultimake company reserves for themselves is not really that useful to
> protect their printer business. Although it might scare off potential
> competitors (interested to offer the same or a derived product), as
> things are probably less clear in court, and the documentation is still
> important, even to such competitor. In a sense the NC clause makes it
> more costly to build a derived product, and the original authors
> apparently are not really interested in that option. (as mentioned,
> trademark law might be another strategy to combine true open source
> hardware & reserve the use of the brand, which IMHO would be more
> compatible with a community ecosystem vision).
> 
> 2) Every now and then I have discussions with designers, inventors and
> other makers about their willingness to share their documentation under
> a free license, but they are afraid of big corporations profiting from
> their work. Indeed that is what Google and Facebook do with the
> GNU/Linux operating system on their server park. It happens everywhere
> and maybe some of us worry about it, while others don't care: this is
> part of the freedoms, that we don't distinguish about the *purpose of
> use*. If we do go this way, things get non-free and complicated.
> 
> I remember the first time I met Dimitry Kleiner was in 2009, when he was
> proposing a preliminary version of a CopyFair license, which he called
> the CopyFarLeft license, [3]. Such license conditions commercial on a
> few social factors: whether a company is worker-owned or whether it's
> profit-driven or not. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation have since
> been dedicating more and more attention to this, see CopyFair license,
> [4] and the Peer Production License, [5].
> 
> Recently we have a few real cases that use this kind of licenses, e.g.
> works translated by Guerrilla Translations, [6], are under the Peer
> Production License.
> 
> But applying these kind of licenses on hardware designs brings us back
> to similar issues as brought up under 1). Are such restrictions really
> effective when some party decides to producte a product based on the design?
> 
> Looking forward to your reflections and further references.
> 
> best regards,
> 
> Wouter
> 
> 
> references:
> 
> [1] https://ultimaker.com/en/about-ultimaker
> 
> [2] https://www.youmagine.com/designs/ultimaker-2-source-files
> 
> [3] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft
> 
> [4] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License
> 
> [5] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License
> 
> [6] http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> best regards,
> 
> Wouter Tebbens
> --
> FKI - http://freeknowledge.eu
> Unlocking the Knowledge Society
> --
> Digital DIY - http://www.didiy.eu/
> IoT - http://thethingsnetwork.org/
> ProCommons - http://procomuns.net/
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20160629/7b2f8116/attachment-0001.html>