[Open-graphics] Definition of Open Hardware

[Nicolas Boulay]

Open hardware and open software or music are based on copyrighted
material. So the 4 liberty of RMS could apply on it. The difference in
nature is the difference between art and tools. There is more
difference between music and software (cf creative common) than
between hardware and software.

Hardware can't be easly change as software and cost something. But the
open hardware "user", user in the GPL way, are not the same. Open
hardware user are soc designer or board designer, they deal with
copyrighted material, plan and ideas. That's not the case with the
buyer of the hardware. He can't be protected by a licence based on
copyright or very hardly (you can't link a final product with the
licence on the hdl code, you can only restrict the use of the hdl
code).

The goal of Open software is more "technicaly better" than freedom.
Because it's much easier to provide in the hardware world.



2006/10/4, Lourens Veen <lourens at rainbowdesert.net>:
> When Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1984, he did so from a
> belief that users of software should be free. This philosophical belief
> was expressed in the definition of free software as software that
> grants the user four specific freedoms (1). Based on this definition,
> and the concept of "copyleft", the GNU GPL was later created.
>
> About 14 years later, in 1998, the Open Source Initiative was formed.
> Rather than talking about the theoretical freedom of software users,
> the open source movement emphasised the practical advantages of
> collaborative software development, arguing that this development model
> results in higher quality software at lower cost (2). This, together
> with RMS' freedoms, resulted in the Debian Free Software Guidelines,
> which subsequently fathered the open source definition (3).
>
> In practice this covers mostly the same software as the free software
> definition, even though the philosophical background of both
> definitions is entirely different. Recently there have been some rather
> visible arguments flying about regarding the new version 3 of the GNU
> GPL, showing that open source and free software are not quite the same
> even in practice.
>
> Software and hardware aren't quite the same in practice either. The
> materials that have been released so far by the OGP have been released
> as HDL under the GNU GPL. Arguably, this is not the best choice
> (although Sun seem to be happy to licence their OpenSPARC under the GPL
> as well. Should we invite them in to this discussion?). The GPL was and
> is intended for software, and it seems that the FSF is not interested
> in open hardware development. The open source definition also
> explicitly mentions software. Issues like DRM, patents, linking, and so
> on play a role in both cases, but may do so in a different way.
> Finally, the law does not treat hardware and software in the same way.
>
> Therefore I believe that we need an Open Hardware Definition. We need to
> know what it means, philosophically and in practice, for hardware to be
> open.
>
> There are many people here, with widely varying views on issues like
> DRM, patents, free software vs. open source, copyleft, and so on. These
> need to be discussed, and we need to decide what we do and do not want
> to allow in open hardware. We need to decide which freedoms and rights
> we want to reserve for the public, and which freedoms and rights we are
> willing to give up to attract more (corporate) developers. We need to
> know where the legal boundaries are in various jurisdictions, and which
> rights/restrictions exist in a legal sense. We need examples and use
> cases. We need to consider open hardware business models and the kind
> of corporate ecosystem we want to have around the open hardware
> community. We need to consider that hardware designs are useless if no
> actual hardware is ever made, and we need to consider that there is no
> point in having open hardware unless it gives us more freedom than the
> proprietary hardware that we have now.
>
> This mail is rather long already, so I'm not going to give a draft or
> abstract. Instead, I'd like to open up this thread for comments and
> ideas. I'll post some myself I'm sure, and the more of you join in the
> better. Let's find that middle ground where the public, end users,
> developers and corporations meet to build a new, open future.
>
> Lourens
>
> 1) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
> 2) http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
> 3) http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
>
>
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