Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2.
OSHW Definition and Best Practices
Alicia Gibb
“Yes, the universe continues to evolve.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
Open Source Hardware Definition
The Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition serves as a set of agreed-upon standards for
the main characteristics that open source hardware must have to be defined as open source
hardware. Although open source software licenses and Creative Commons licenses existed
prior to this definition, the open hardware community recognized that while these worked
for documentation and source files, they did not fit the needs of physical formats. The major
issue with these existing licenses is that hardware is not protected by copyright, which the
Creative Commons licenses, GNU General Public License (GPL), and copyleft licenses all
depend on. Instead, hardware is protected by patent law. A patent is not granted upon cre-
ation like copyright is, but rather has to be applied for.
The OSHW Definition, although uses the term “license” many times to describe what a
license may or may not include, is not a license itself. The reason it is not a license is that it
does not hold rights to anything that a license could be granted to give away. (See
Chapter
3
,
Licensing Open Source Hardware
,
for further explanation of the legal and intellectual
property implications of hardware.) The OSHW Definition is a social contract that the open
hardware community has agreed to uphold. It allows the community to have agreement on
decisions such as whether open source hardware can be created with a noncommercial
clause attached (it cannot) and whether the source files must be free of charge and access-
ible via a website (they must).
Once the definition was created, issues arose regarding specific methods and processes
of open hardware. In turn, a Best Practices document was created to notify the community
of practices such as the following: no delaying the release of files if the product is being
advertised as open source hardware, labeling which parts are open and which are closed if
the hardware is a hybrid, and respecting other inventors' trademarks.
The following is the direct language of the OSHW Definition. It is an open-source hard-
ware statement of principles, developed by members of the open source hardware commu-
nity. However, much of the writing is attributed to Windell Oskay and David Mellis, and
the conversation about starting a definition is attributed to Ayah Bdeir. These documents
