Open Licensing—Advanced Sharing - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 40

The CC licenses are summarized in Figure 3.1 . There is obviously a lot of disagreement
about licenses, which are highly varied depending on people's personal preferences. To be
considered “truly open-source” and to it in with the established definition, there need to be
no restrictions on the use of the design, which includes NC, or such phrases such as “commer-
cialization requires purchasing a license,” “no government/military use,” etc. The NC license,
in particular, is perhaps easy to see the appeal for designers to use (e.g. people do not mind
sharing, but they also feel cheated if you take what they share and then go and make a lot of
money of of it). Licenses such as the CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, GPL, BSD, and MIT do not have these
restrictions and are thus the “purest” form of open source.
FIGURE 3.1 Summaries of creative commons licenses. Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ .
It is easy to be sympathetic to people that do not want the creation they give to the world to
be used by someone else to make a lot of money—or worse to be used to kill people. From an
academic researcher's perspective, there are a couple of points you need to keep in the back of
your mind when considering licenses. First, your chances of making any serious money on an
innovation are extremely small unless you devote an enormous amount of time into the busi-
ness end of it. Most scientists and engineers find this somewhat boring and tedious. Work-
ing on a business prevents them from doing as much innovative work on the technical side,
which is why most academics avoid it. There is an unstated assumption that academics have
given up crass economic compensation for academic freedom and higher pursuits in the ivory
tower. 16 This is why the vast majority of our work is essentially open sourced in the literature.
Some academics do start spin-off companies from their research. Does this preclude them
from participating in the open-source community? Absolutely not. Even if you are considering