History of the Open Hardware Movement - Building Open Source Hardware - page 9

Forking of Open Hardware and Open Source Hardware
Only a few days after the 2011 Open Hardware Summit, and in the midst of several heated
debates 4 on licenses and what constitutes open source hardware, Bruce Perens abandoned
the concerted efforts of those involved in the summit and the OSHW Definition. Perens's
justification for this course of action was a concern that the selected logo could not be
trademarked 5 and that the new licenses could not be legally enforced (Perens 2011b). The
counter-arguments, voiced mostly—although not exclusively—by Phillip Torrone, main-
tained that the logo had been selected by public vote and therefore should not be aban-
doned; that the existing system, albeit informal, had worked so far; and that most open
source hardware developers couldn't handle the expense of litigation even with legally en-
forceable licenses to protect their work (Jones 2011; Torrone 2011a).
4 . This debate took place through both private email exchanges and on the Summit's mailing list. Even
though several people chimed in, the most vocal participants on the discussion were Phillip Torrone
and Bruce Perens.
5 . A company was (unsuccessfully) attempting to trademark the label “Open Source Hardware,” and
the current OSHW logo had been based on the one adopted by the Open Source Initiative.
As a result, and despite several attempts at reconciling these differences, the commu-
nity forked into two parallel efforts: one under the banner “open hardware” (“open hard-
ware” had been trademarked several years earlier by Perens) and another under the banner
“open source hardware” (OSHW). Thus, openhardware.org, now viewable through the In-
ternet archive, housed an organization by the same name, led by Bruce Perens, whose
main goal was to identify and promote practices that meet all the combined requirements
of the Open Source Hardware Definition, the Open Source Definition, and the Four
Freedoms of the Free Software Foundation (Perens 2011a). Meanwhile, oshwa.org be-
came the home of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), with founding ef-
forts by Alicia Gibb, her board (Catarina Mota, Danese Cooper, Wendy Seltzer, Windell
Oskay, and Nathan Seidle), legal counsel Aaron Williamson, and the first members of the
organization. OSHWA seeks to become a hub of open source hardware activity of all
genres, while cooperating with other entities such as TAPR, CERN, and OSI.