[OH Updates] the solderpad hardware license

[Javier Serrano]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 09:50 -0400, G. Andrew Stone wrote:
> Andrew, your blog implies that you don't seem too interested in a
> copyleft style license, which is too bad because that's where the real
> interesting problems lie:

I agree. One of the main reasons for us to use CERN OHL is the
persistence clause. There is some discussion in legal lists as to how
enforceable it is, but if people take it seriously, and many do, it can
result in a lot of interesting designs being published. Two examples:

- We designed a PCIe card with an FPGA and an FMC socket:
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/spec/wiki Somebody thought they'd like to
add a PowerPC processor to the board, so they modified the design and,
per the persistence of CERN OHL, published the result:
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/powec/wiki

- We designed a 100MS/s ADC FMC board:
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/fmc-adc-100m14b4cha/wiki Somebody thought
100 MS/s was not enough so they modified the design to sample at 250
MS/s http://www.ohwr.org/projects/fmc-adc-250m12b2cha/wiki and again,
they published the result. 

TAPR OHL is similar to (and predates) CERN OHL in this respect. As I
said, it is not 100% clear yet how sound all these licenses are because
none of them has been tried in court. I am not competent to comment on
this. But as a designer, I can already see the benefits of using them
(this is answering those who question the utility of a licence at all).
One other important thing for us is to be able to collaborate with
companies in an easy way. There are many companies for which having a
clear legal framework for collaboration is a must. So here again, a
clear licence is very useful. Finally, I think the disclaimers are quite
important for some organisations, including ours, before they can
publish a design.

So, to summarize: I think using a licence is seldom a problem and can be
very useful. People can choose between a non-persistent (Solderpad) and
a persistent (CERN OHL, TAPR OHL) licence depending on what they want to
achieve. The CC family of licences can also be a good choice for cases
where the licensor just wants to treat the design documentation as any
other document, without special regard to the fact that this
documentation can be used to produce hardware. The licence landscape is
evolving, but in my opinion all the licences I mentioned are already
very usable. 

Cheers,

Javier