Human Practices: The Open Hardware Revolution

In choosing the novel Hardware Track, this years’ Cambridge-JIC iGEM team has come across unexpected challenges. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these have often required us to look into fields of work that we have had little or no previous experience in. This has been particularly true when navigating the world of intellectual property law, including hardware licensing and design copyright. In developing Open Source Hardware (OSH) as part of the competition, we recognised the need for an easily-digestible, comprehensive and hardware-specific guide to ensuring the OSH is accessible to the community.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.

OSH is “free as in free speech, not free beer” or more formally Libre rather than Gratis.

CC0 and Unlicensed Work

The Creative Commons ‘No Rights Reserved license’ (known as the CC0 license) essentially waives all copyrights you have over you work. This means there is no legal protection against you works being used, modified, redistributed or made proprietary.

Under the CC0 anyone can access your work, and use it in any way they want. However, you cannot license the work of other people under the CC0 unless you have express permission to do so or they have also used the CC0 license. This is an example of license compatibility issues (see compatibility tables).

Unlicensed work released into the public domain can be used by anyone in any way, again meaning that continued access cannot be ensured. Creative Commons recommends using the ‘Public Domain Mark’ for this work. This is intended for old works that are already in the public domain without copyright in order to provide information about them [1].

[1] Wiki.creativecommons.org, (2015).Frequently Asked Questions - Creative Commons. [online] [Accessed 5 Sep. 2015].

Permissive Licenses

Features of Permissive licenses:

• There are no reciprocity requirements when using a Permissive license. Redistributors can restrict access to derivative products and make them proprietary [1]

• Hence they make it more likely that a given product will be repackaged and commercialised [2]

• This is seen by some as a driving force for innovation and an additional freedom compared to Copyleft licenses [3]

• They are designed to be legally simple and compatible with a greater variety of downstream licenses than Copyleft licenses (see compatibility charts)

• It is important to recognise that any improvements on the product that are made proprietary will not be available to the community. This is not a problem with Copyleft licenses.

A variety of Permissive licenses are available (Fig. 5, Fig. 6), and recently it has been proposed to develop a new one based on the Apache 2.0 software license as this is already well established [4].

[1] Opensource.org, (2015). Frequently Answered Questions | Open-source Initiative. [online] [Accessed 6 Sep. 2015].
[2] Gnu.org, (2015). Categories of Free and Nonfree Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation. [online] [Accessed 6 Sep. 2015].
[3] Opensource.com, (2015). How to choose a license for your open-source project | Opensource.com. [online] [Accessed 6 Sep. 2015].
[4] Katz, A. (2012). Towards a Functional Licence for Open Hardware. IFOSS L. Rev., pp.41-62.

CERN OHL

The CERN OHL was developed to do for hardware what the General Public License (GPL) did for software, and is available for free download*. In 2009, scientists in the community at CERN began to create the Open Hardware Repository: “a place on the web for electronics designers at experimental physics facilities to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement” [1].

The fundamental principals of the CERN OHL are:

• If modifications are to be released to the community, they must be under the same license scheme as the original product

• This ensures that the license is persistent, and ultimately everyone in the community benefits

• The process of improvement uses collaboration between anyone in the community

CERN itself uses the license to release Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) that it develops back into the physics community. CERN recognised the potentially huge benefit of releasing hardware to the community, where it is effectively peer-reviewed and reconfigured to precisely match end-user requirements [1].

Notable new projects that have taken up the CERN OHL include Adafruit Industries and Citoyens Capteurs, which aims to develop a network of citizen air pollution sensors (amongst other OSH programs) [2].

* See OHWR webpage for more information.
[1] Ayass, M. (2015). CERN Open Hardware Licence. [online] [Accessed 7 Sep. 2015].
[2] Wiki.citoyenscapteurs.net, (2015). Le Wiki des Citoyens Capteurs. [online] [Accessed 12 Aug. 2015].

TAPR OHL

The TAPR OHL was developed by Tucson Amateur Packet Radio, and like the CERN OHL was created to extend the success of OSS licenses*. It is available for anyone to use, and can be downloaded directly from their website [1]. Just like the CERN OHL it is a Copyleft or ‘viral’ license: the terms applied to one product are propagated to all downstream products. In short, this means that once a product is made open-source, it and all it’s modifications remain accessible to the community.

The key premises of the TAPR OHL are outlined below, as described by the official website [1]:

1. Products can be used for any legal purpose

2. Unmodified documentation can be released, but it must be in the form of the entire package

3. Products can be commercially released as long as the documentation is also freely released, or is available for free for up to 3 years

4. All modifications must be released under the OHL

5. All modifications must be well documented, and attempts made to notify the designers of the original product

Overall, the above requirements ensure that nobody is denied the rights to access the product and its documentation, including all downstream versions.

For more information on TAPR licensing procedures, see here.

* It is worth mentioning that these licenses were created by volunteers with expertise in legal matters. They did this for the benefit of the community itself, despite it being a complex and time-consuming process.
[1] Tapr.org, (2015). The TAPR Open Hardware License. [online] [Accessed 23 Aug. 2015].

TAPR OHL Extra Info: TAPR documentation requirements

If you create a design that you want to license under the OHL, you should [1]:

1. Include the OHL document in a file named LICENSE.TXT (or LICENSE.PDF) that is included in the documentation package.

2. If the file format allows, include a notice like "Licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License (www.tapr.org/OHL)" in each documentation file. While not required, you should also include this notice on printed circuit board artwork and the product itself; if space is limited the notice can be shortened or abbreviated.

3. Include a copyright notice in each file and on printed circuit board artwork.

4. If you wish to be notified of modifications that others may make, include your email address in a file named "CONTRIB.TXT" or something similar.

5. Any time the OHL requires you to make documentation available to others, you must include all the materials you received from the upstream licensors. In addition, if you have modified the documentation:

6. You must identify the modifications in a text file (preferably named "CHANGES.TXT") that you include with the documentation. That file must also include a statement like "These modifications are licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License."

7. You must include any new files you created, including any manufacturing files (such as Gerber files) you create in the course of making products.

8. You must include both "before" and "after" versions of all files you modified*.

9. You may include files in proprietary formats, but you must also include open format versions (such as Gerber, ASCII, Postscript, or PDF) if your tools can create them.

* Here it could be easier to link to the original version. Github allows you to do this by “forking” existing repositories to a new one. If you want to contribute back, you can send your changes back by sending a so-called "pull request" back to the original repository as a request to pull your new code into the original repo.
[1] Tapr.org, (2015). The TAPR Open Hardware License. [online] [Accessed 23 Aug. 2015].

GNU GPL

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the paradigm for Copyleft licenses. It was developed by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation in the context of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Here, as with OSH, the reference to ‘free’ is in terms of freedom and not cost.

The license agrees with, and established the four essential freedoms of FOSS:

Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work
Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work
Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others
Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works

As a software-specific license, the GNU GPL does not fall within the scope of our project. However, it is worth mentioning that many of the current OSH licenses were developed on the standards of the GPL and in an attempt to achieve what the GPL has in the context of hardware.

For more information about the GNU GPL, visit GNU webpage.

Copyleft or Viral Licenses

The phenomenon of OSH is in its infancy, and as a result there are only a handful of potential options when choosing an appropriate license. Many of these are Copyleft or ‘viral’ licenses.

Features of viral licenses:

• Any derivatives must be licensed under the same conditions as the original

• Once licensed, all derivatives will be fully accessible forever

• Reduced likelihood of any derivatives being commercialised compared to Permissive licenses, and no chance of them being made proprietary

• Increased issues of license compatibility compared to Permissive licenses. This could be a problem if a new license is released later in time that may be more appropriate

One of the most widespread is the Creative Commons* Attribution-ShareAlike license (Fig. 3, Fig. 4). This is however not specifically designed for OSH, and was instead developed for works of art such as music and designs, as well as software [1]. More comprehensive and hardware-specific licenses have been created, and here the authors will focus on two of them: the CERN OHL and the TAPR OHL.

* A global non-profit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools (Creative Commons webpage).
[1] Opensource.com, (2015). What is open hardware? | Opensource.com. [online][Accessed 23 Aug. 2015].

Open Source Hardware

The Cambridge-JIC team is looking to make our product as accessible as possible. This means making our microscope open-source. According to the Open-Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), this means it “is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design” [1]. This not only requires well-documented procedures but also clear and simple designs that can be modified by non-experts.

The advantages of OSH (Fig. 1):

• The core values reflect the power of collaboration in troubleshooting and improving designs

• Improvements are shared to all users of the hardware, and it can remain freely available forever

• Scientific experiments have different requirements in terms of software and hardware. OSH can address the need for low-volume production of equipment that can be tailored to specific protocols [2].

The OSH revolution extends much further than scientific hardware, and is fully compatible with a commercial business plan. Universally, it has the potential for “market expansion, innovation, acceleration, educational enhancement and medical care improvement” [2].

OSH is “free as in free speech, not free beer” or more formally Libre rather than Gratis [3]. For example, the Arduino microcontroller* designs are freely available online but the foundation also sells them for a profit for funding. Arduino is registered as a trademark too, which protects the brand from cheap replicas [4].

* According to arduino.cc “Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software”. In our project, we use Arduinos to control servo motors and LEDs within the microscope.
[1] Open-source Hardware Association, (2012). Open-Source Hardware FAQ. [online] [Accessed 23 Aug. 2015].
[2] Pearce, J. (2012). Building Research Equipment with Free, Open-Source Hardware. Science, 337(6100), pp.1303-1304.
[3] Gnu.org, (2015). Why Open-source Misses the Point of Free Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation. [online] [Accessed 23 Aug. 2015].
[4] Arduino.cc, (2015). Arduino - FAQ . [online] [Accessed 9 Sep. 2015].

Compatibility Chart for Licenses

The table below (Fig. 9) indicates the compatibilities of the Creative Commons licenses with one-another, as described on their website.

The diagram below (Fig. 10) indicates the relationships between common OSH licenses, and their categorisation as Permissive/Copyleft. The arrows indicate compatibility in a directional sense. The names in the boxes represent common licenses, and the ‘+’ means ‘and all later versions’. David Wheeler created this graph in the context of OSS, but some of the licenses are applicable to hardware. For a clarification of some of the terms, see the glossary.

Glossary of Terms