Open Licensing—Advanced Sharing - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 41

starting a company, the open-source methodology can be one of your greatest assets. It is often
far superior to harvest the benefits of moving toward open source as discussed in the pre-
vious chapter. In many cases, a small start-up company does not have the financial scale to
wage and win a batle in patent court. Consider the views of Nathan Seidle, the CEO of Spark-
fun (a large open-source electronics company). Seidle has pointed out in discussion what The
calls “IP obesity”: “If your idea is unique, easily copied, and can be sold for profit in a loc-
al market, it will be.” [ 17 ] . At the time of this writing, Sparkfun, an OSHW company, had
135 employees, $75 million of sales, 600,000 customers and had open sourced 430 unpatented
products. Clearly, it is possible to base a business of of the open-source paradigm, but it de-
mands constant innovation to stay ahead of the copiers. As Seidle points out, companies that
do not innovate, particularly in technology, will just be overrun, with or without patents [ 17 ] .
Most researchers are not in equipment design for a start-up company, and thus it is tempt-
ing to join the “beyond licenses” crowd, which simply shares their code or designs with no
thought to license. This is far more common than you might think. The OSHWA conducted
a survey in February of 2012 of the international OSHW community; out of more than 2000
responses from 70 countries, it was clear that the majority of the community releases designs
with no license whatsoever [ 18 ] . This may prevent having to think about the issue, but what
it risks is that your work could be locked away in the intellectual anticommons and slow de-
velopment for others. If no licensing scheme is set up, OSHW could move to the anticommons
over time. As Catarina Mota, the co-founder of Everywhere Tech 17 (open-source technology
transfer), openMaterials 18 (open-source and DIY experimentation with smart materials) and
altLa b 19 (Lisbon's hackerspace) have pointed out, IP is a hot topic and quickly evolving. To
overcome these challenges, Mota and others of the OSHWA are atempting to clarify the IP
space for innovators interested in the open-source methodology.
3.3.4 Other open-source hardware licenses
There are two other main historical OHLs. First, the SGPL 20 was developed for the Simputer,
which is a low-cost portable alternative to PCs. The simputer project was meant primarily to
target the digital divide and help those in the developing world, as it ensures that illiteracy is
not a barrier to handling a computer and enable the benefits of modern IT to reach the com-
mon man. As has been discussed elsewhere, this access can be extremely beneficial [ 19 - 21 ] .
On the other end of the target user, technical sophistication spectrum is the CERN 21 OHL. The
CERN OHL 22 governs the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design doc-
umentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products.
3.4 Open Source Hardware Association Definition
The OSHWA board along with the help of OSHWA members developed the OSHW definition
on, appropriately enough, a wiki ( freedomdeined.org ) . 23 The updated text of the definition
can be found on the OSHWA web site and the following two sections detail the OSHWA ver-
sion 1.0 of an OSHW definition [ 22 ] . The following two subsections relay both the OSHWA
statement of principles and their definition in full.
3.4.1 Open-source hardware statement of principles 1.0
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. The hard-