Open Licensing—Advanced Sharing - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 35

to the maximizing farmers. Ignoring for a moment, whether or not this is even true, it is less
productive and we as a society lose in overall innovation if we are caught falling into the
trap of selfishness.1 1 There is an even bigger problem: the standard discourse assumes that this
tragedy is also applicable to the domain of ideas.
First, it should be pointed out that this view of the anticommons has been critiqued for not
understanding the complex relations between people and their use of the commons. Many
historical cultures managed to live for centuries without creating any form of tragedy with
their common resources. You probably have good examples where you live (here we call them
“parks”, which are generally the most atractive locations in a city). In many of these cases,
people from all over the world, representing many societies and cultures, have created social
rules and institutional structures to manage common resources [ 2 - 4 ] . We do this to prevent
the commons' tragedy and these rules do not necessarily have to come from private owner-
ship of resources, although this has worked in some cultures. Structures and rules, such as
clearly defined boundaries, collective choice agreements, and monitoring, have also helped
to regulate the use of the commons in many fields. While this management has not always
been perfect by any measure, it has led to the successful use of natural ecological resources
without their depletion for much of our known human history. 2 The commons, which is cre-
ated with the open-source methodology discussed in Chapter 2 , works much in the same way.
Licensing, crediting, and peer-review are examples of the social rules and institutional struc-
tures that regulate and manage the commons of open source in software, images, and aca-
demic scholarship, respectively. These rules allow for innovations to occur and even go a long
way toward encouraging it, while at the same time, ensuring knowledge is not locked away
in the anticommons. As progress in any of the fields of science or engineering occur, or more
speciically, in science-related research equipment, it is clear that the anticommons methods
of the industrial revolution are no longer the only routes to ensure ideas and products are
respectfully credited and used. In fact, the antiquated anticommons methods are often coun-
terproductive to both innovation and dissemination of good ideas, solutions, and optimized
hardware.
This chapter will first examine software rights to pull in lessons from free and open-source
software (FOSS) for open-source hardware (OSHW) developers. FOSS provides examples of
the GNU Public License (GPL) and the rich selection of Creative Commons (CC) licenses,
which are summarized and explored for application to hardware. Then, the current selection
of OSHW licenses are reviewed including (1) the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) Open
Hardware License (OHL), (2) the Chumby License, (3) the Simputer General Public License
(SGPL), and (4) the CERN 3 OHL. Next, the Open Source Hardware Association's (OSHWA)
principles and definition are provided as a basis for a transition to OSHW. The most import-
ant section for those new to the ield is the review of best practices and etiquete for using
OSHW. Finally, the chapter concludes with a review of the current IP challenges to those wish-
ing to pursue OSHW development for the benefit of everyone and concluding thoughts are
provided.
3.2 Learning from Software: Software Rights
Although software was born free, it was quickly locked down by IP laws. In the computer soft-
ware field, where it is trivially easy to copy code and then disseminate programs for zero cost,
the old industrial model of IP has been used for rent seeking 4 . To enforce copyright restrictions
and limit their liability, early software developers and companies created custom licenses that
were contracts between the user and developer. These expensive contracts, as they were of-