What license(s) do you recommend, and/or not recommend, for open source hardware, and why? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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I'm uncertain if the GPLv3 ^[1]^, or something from Creative Commons ^[3]^, like the CC-BY-SA ^[2]^ license, would be appropriate for open source hardware. I've come across the CERN-OHL-S ^[4]^, which appears interesting, but I've never encountered it in the wild, so I'm wary of it's apparent obscurity.

References

Type: Webpage. Title: "GNU General Public License". Publisher: "GNU Operating System". Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:29Z. URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html.
Type: Webpage. Title: "Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International". Publisher: "Creative Commons". Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:30Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
Type: Webpage. Title: "About CC Licenses". Publisher: "Creative Commons". Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:31Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/.
Type: Text. Title: "CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal". Publisher: "CERN". Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:33Z. URI: https://gitlab.com/ohwr/project/cernohl/-/wikis/uploads/819d71bea3458f71fba6cf4fb0f2de6b/cern_ohl_s_v2.txt.

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[-] lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago

Where are you hearing this?? The FSF has an entire licence dedicated to limiting commercial use of your software (the a-gpl), gpl-3 is also much more limiting which us why linus doesnt use it for the kernal, but few would call gpl-3 not open source. Open source means people can modify and redistribute your code, theres nothing preventing you from saying "This code is free (as in beer and freedom). Keep it that way)"

[-] pReya@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago

The reason for the creation of AGPL is not "limiting" commercial use. It's there, so that a company commercially using your AGPL project is also required to publish its changes under AGPL, even if the only way they "distribute" the software is as a Application Service Procider (SaaS company). Because under regular GPL, this case wasn't covered, so big companies could use your code, modify it, offer it as a SaaS product and NOT publish their changes unter a free license.

AGPL specifically exists, so the rules around commercial SaaS use are clear – so I'd argue it's the opposite of "limiting commercial use".

See: https://yairudi.com/understanding-asp-loophole/

[-] lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

Sorry yea bad wording on my part, I was intending "limiting" to refer to stopping companys from profiting off of your work without limits (controbuting back to the comminity)

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

It was in this thread here:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21153303

A company was calling their product Open Source because they published the source code and allowed anyone to modify it. But they didn't want Google taking their work for free. Lemmy users called them scammers/open source washers because they didn't want their work exploited by large corporations.

I still find it weird that Open Source defenders are adamant that you must allow large corporations to exploit your work or you are a fraud. I had no idea.