Team:Cambridge-JIC/Practices

CAMBRIDGE-JIC

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.

Find the License for your Project

CC0

Permissive Licenses

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 (1). 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” [10].

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 [10].

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) [11].

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 (2). It is available for anyone to use, and can be downloaded directly from their website(3) [12]. 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 [12]:

  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

GNU GPL

Viral Licenses

Open Source Hardware