OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

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sircastor
 
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Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2009 1:46 pm

OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by sircastor »

Hi Folks,

I'm currently working on a project that I hope to develop into a toy line. It will have both hardware and software aspects to it and an online element, but I'm finding myself going back and forth on licensing. I like OSHW and OSS. I like the idea that the community can participate and improve upon technology that I've created, and make their own variations.

Part of my concept involves having a physical thing represented virtually on the website: You plug a thing in, and the website sees you have it plugged in. What I don't want is for someone to be able to simply tell the software that the thing is there without having it. (this connects to a game functionality, and I'd like to remove as much possibility of "cheating" as I can), is that in contradiction with the OSS philosophy? Am I falling into the realm of DRM? Can I encrypt the data if they can see how the encryption is done?

My hangup comes from the common sort of things that you see in this area.
- Is someone else going to take this and be more successful than I am at it (and push me out of my own market), Should I even be worried about that?
- If I have some things open, but not others, can I truly call this an Open Source Project? (The software and hardware are open but the net API is not?)

In terms of the devices, software, etc, I think "People are going to want to in here and see how it ticks. Why make it harder than it is?"


Any help, thoughts, links to talks/papers, etc. would be very helpful and appreciated.

TheFallen
 
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Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2010 1:28 pm

Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by TheFallen »

I'm not entirely sure but could you not use PGP here? Your toy has a private and public key thusly if you send it an encypted pass phrase it can then decode it and then the toy sends you the decrypted pass phrase as you'll know it's one of your toys as you know the public/private keys for all the toys?

Although I think PGP is pretty hard to implement on micro-controllers. Maybe use the RSA system of having a psuedo-random number generator and you know the seed values?

TheFallen
 
Posts: 94
Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2010 1:28 pm

Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by TheFallen »

Gottit. AES consists of a message and a key. You keep the key's secret (change them every 100 toy?) but keep track of which toy has which key. You send it a token which has been AES encrypted then the toy does something to the token (no need for this to be secret) then you re-encrypt it and send it back. Alternatively just send the decrypted token back.

The biggest problem you have is that people will be able to listen in on the communications VERY easily both on the receive and transmit sides. This is not ideal for encryption security. Of course the way round this is to make it so it just isn't worth breaking it.

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brucef
 
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Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by brucef »

In my opinion, what you're trying to do can be compatible with OSHW, so long as you don't use some sort of user-hostile lockout somewhere. OSHW doesn't automatically mean "everything is free" - Adafruit generously gives away their designs, for instance, but they don't offer free online support to people who buy non-Adafruit kits or who assemble their designs from scratch.

If your toy has a microcontroller, I might try to skip all the runtime encryption and instead assign each toy a unique identifier from a very large, sparse identifier space. Store that number in the website's database and in the program downloaded to the toy's MCU, and the toy should be easy to identify when it connects to your website. Your users' online accounts can accumulate IDs for their toys, and if an ID appears in a second account you can assume they have sold/given the toy to someone else and transfer it over. Your key generation algorithm (stored on a machine in your back office) could be as simple as:

Code: Select all

sha256('big secret fixed string' + sequential number)
I can't say much to the competitiveness concerns, other than to note that people who design this stuff and give away their design work often seem to accumulate a fair bit of goodwill, which is a competitive advantage of its own. If mega-big-toy-co is going to rip you off, well, a closed-source design probably wasn't going to stop them anyway.

adafruit
 
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Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by adafruit »

sircastor wrote:I like OSHW and OSS. I like the idea that the community can participate and improve upon technology that I've created, and make their own variations.
this is great to hear!
sircastor wrote: - Is someone else going to take this and be more successful than I am at it (and push me out of my own market), Should I even be worried about that?
always possible, but it being open source hardware or closed will not stop anyone from doing something like you are. building a community, a great product, great support are all reasons for people to support your product is the way to go regardless if it's open source or not.

as far as real world data points, so far we do not know of someone doing open source hardware that was pushed out of their market because someone else came selling the same open source hardware product. there are thousands of oshw projects too, so it does not seem to be an issue.
sircastor wrote: - If I have some things open, but not others, can I truly call this an Open Source Project? (The software and hardware are open but the net API is not?)
have you checked out the open source hardware definition?

http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW

and/or the osi

http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

these are guides you can use to figure out what people usually agree is oshw/oss. our opinion is there are a spectrum of people who do open source hardware, some would say what you're doing is ok as along as you make it clear what is and isn't, and some would say it's not "truly" open source. but keep in mind someone has even said we do not actually do oshw because one reason or another too :)

cheers,
adafruit

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sircastor
 
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Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by sircastor »

Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions. I realized that there was a missing piece that sort of solves and enhances my concern. As I mentioned, I'm working on a toy line. Some minor issues aside, I really have no problem with the software or the hardware designs being distributed. I'd love for someone to take my toy and expand, build upon it, make it do things I never thought of. In that respect, it's almost a no-brainer. Open the hardware, open the software, open the firmware. If you want to make a crazy competing toyline or a new computer peripheral, have at it: We can all take the stuff you've done an add to it. (Yay!)

The component that I think I was really worried about was the creative/story-element. Distributing the hardware and software makes it so people can program their own stuff, expand upon it, and make it do more. If I put characters, style, etc under a Creative Commons license that's non-commercial I think it opens up the community to a lot of really cool options. Come up with a great variation on the toy? Put it up on instructables. Build one for your nephew for his birthday.

But If I make the CC license non-commercial, does that get in the way of ensuring the open-hardware license is still legit for commercial use? I know I'm bordering on the legal advice thing, and I'm not asking for that (Sooner or later, I'm gonna have to talk to a lawyer anyway, so I'll leave that for then).

So I guess my question here is, would it bother you? Suppose you bought a toy for your son/daughter/child that was offered as "An Open Source Toy". Would you be miffed if you found out that you couldn't sell something you made as branded with the toyline? Would you be allright with just being able to use "Compatible with _____"?

adafruit
 
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Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by adafruit »

it is so cool to hear about how you valuing sharing and want to bake that in to your works!
sircastor wrote:If I put characters, style, etc under a Creative Commons license that's non-commercial I think it opens up the community to a lot of really cool options.
non-commercial is a hard thing to actually do, we'll use your example as an example :)
sircastor wrote:Come up with a great variation on the toy? Put it up on instructables. Build one for your nephew for his birthday.
instructables has ads on their site, so is that commercial use of the characters? these are where debates start to happen. but we think these licenses are more about telling folks what you'd like them to do.

saying the characters are nc doesn't sound like it will have anything to do with the hardware or software, so if you ask us we'd say that's a cool sounding open-source toy!

cheers,
adafruit

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len17
 
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Re: OS HW and SW - Commercial allowed or no?

Post by len17 »

Some game developers (e.g. id Software) have released their game engine software under an open source license, while keeping the game's artwork and data files closed. If you were to also release your artwork under a non-commercial license, that'd be great.

You just have to make sure that your "artistic" work is in separate files from the actual program code and hardware designs. Then you can release the source files in separate bundles with separate licenses. IANAL but it seems pretty straightforward to me.

As for calling it "An Open Source Toy", just make sure to state clearly and simply what people are allowed to do, because most of them aren't going to read the actual licenses. If you state up front that you support non-commercial mods, fanfic, etc., that makes a really good impression.

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