3 ms·

Personally, I don't think the community reaction has been overblown at all. If nothing else, they have acted in profoundly bad faith by soliciting free work fr

Personally, I don't think the community reaction has been overblown at all. If nothing else, they have acted in profoundly bad faith by soliciting free work from the open hardware community in exchange for the promise of an open hardware business model. They can't just say "you guys should design a bunch of stuff for us for free, but any minor improvement we make is proprietary and WE'LL SUE YOU INTO THE GROUND IF YOU TRY TO USE IT IN YOUR DESIGN!". Patents and closed source software are the enemies of the Open Source Hardware/Software movements. They lied about their intentions, and people feel betrayed. If they had been up front about their business model, I suspect they would have not received as much support from the community as they did - support which was instrumental to reaching the status that they have.

technomancy 12y ago
So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. It's not particularly difficult for me to release my work under a license that would prevent anyone distributing it from engaging in patent litigation. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices?
- kanzure 12y ago
  > So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices? Copyright is one of the three main types of intellectual property in the world-wide WIPO system. The other two are patents (hardware) and trademarks. Guess which one gets to trump copyright licensing and exist beyond copyright law? This isn't an explicit answer, but related to your question: http://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-hardware-and-law http://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-h... My guess is that a lawyer (which I'm not) would tell you that the patent protection clauses you refer to only apply to the copyrightable material, and not the inventions themselves (even in software).

technomancy 12y ago

So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. It's not particularly difficult for me to release my work under a license that would prevent anyone distributing it from engaging in patent litigation. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices?

kanzure 12y ago
> So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices? Copyright is one of the three main types of intellectual property in the world-wide WIPO system. The other two are patents (hardware) and trademarks. Guess which one gets to trump copyright licensing and exist beyond copyright law? This isn't an explicit answer, but related to your question: http://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-hardware-and-law http://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-h... My guess is that a lawyer (which I'm not) would tell you that the patent protection clauses you refer to only apply to the copyrightable material, and not the inventions themselves (even in software).