Creative Commons

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Get help, and assist others in with open source kits and running a business! Do not ask for legal advice or for consulting services in this forum, only general biz questions!
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pm6041141
 
Posts: 79
Joined: Thu May 29, 2008 5:26 pm

Creative Commons

Post by pm6041141 »

How do you make a project "open source"? Do you have to add a creative commons header in your code? Or can you just publish your code/schematics etc. Does creative commons licensing add a "use at your own risk" disclaimer?

I guess what I am looking for is a open source your project 101 tutorial.

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westfw
 
Posts: 2008
Joined: Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:01 pm

Re: Creative Commons

Post by westfw »

There are a lot of relatively complicated issues, mostly having to do with exactly what you're willing to allow other people to do. For example, the easiest thing to do is to say "I release this to the public domain", which (assuming you have the rights to do so) allows anyone to do anything at all to it. That includes removing any traces of your authorship, slapping their own name in there, and selling it as if it was theirs. At the opposite extreme is something like the gnu GPL, which says that if someone modifies your code, then their modifications have to becomes as available as the original code.

You can make up your own "license" and requirements, but the advantage of something like CC, BSD, or GPL is that they are becoming moderately well understood by both the industry and the legal community.

Probably a good place to start is at http://www.creativecommons.org

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len17
 
Posts: 394
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2009 7:20 pm

Re: Creative Commons

Post by len17 »

Note that Creative Commons licenses aren't meant for software - they're for "traditional" media like writing, music and pictures. For software licenses, there's a good list of choices at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category.

You should put a copyright notice in each file - source code, compiled binary, documentation, etc. For source code & other text files, you can put the license text in each file, or put a reference to a "LICENSE.txt" file.

If you're re-using someone else's open-source files, you have to preserve their copyright & license notices. You may end up with a big, long LICENSE.txt file.

Creative Commons and (most) open source licenses include "as-is" and "at-your-own-risk" clauses.

Here's a project of mine, if you want to see how I do it.

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chatham
 
Posts: 144
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 2:30 am

Re: Creative Commons

Post by chatham »

Things get kinda tricky for hardware, since hardware is traditionally covered by patents and trade secret stuff, therefore, for the actual hardware, the software licenses like the GPL aren't applicable, nor are CC licenses, since they all cover copyright. Still, if you want the hardware to be open source, you pretty much just have to publish it, and that alone will prevent anyone else from being able to patent your invention (unless they were making the same thing at the same time, but that gets complicated...). So that guarantees that your actual hardware idea will be available for anyone to use, but it's certainly a permissive way to license it - no attribution requirements, viral licensing provisions like the GPL, etc.

Unfortunately, the only way to legally enforce those rights would be to get an actual patent, which can very well be an expensive process.

There are a few ways to help mitigate that. One is to have a great product and service, and trust that goodwill will bring you enough customers that people looking for your product think that your product is the way to go, or at least can recognize that it's the actual original source of the product. This goes along with maintaining control of the trademarks and names of your product(s) - so like anyone can make and sell an Arduino, but can't call it an Arduino, and so Arduino becomes the Coke to the competition's store-brand soda.

Additionally, by licensing the firmware under an open source license, that will help enforce some sort of attribution requirement with distribution.

Hopefully this helps clear up questions about the actual hardware side of things.

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len17
 
Posts: 394
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2009 7:20 pm

Re: Creative Commons

Post by len17 »

Alan Chatham wrote:Things get kinda tricky for hardware, since hardware is traditionally covered by patents and trade secret stuff, therefore, for the actual hardware, the software licenses like the GPL aren't applicable, nor are CC licenses, since they all cover copyright.
Copyright is applicable to things like schematics and board layout files. Copyright protects only the specific file, not the underlying functionality (which as you said is the realm of patents). Ladyada's design files are published under a Creative Commons license - check it out.

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