Open Hardware Journal 103
Bruce Perens writes "Open Hardware Journal is a new technical journal on designs for physical or electronic objects that are shared as if they were Open Source software. It's an open journal under a Creative Commons license. The first issue contains articles on 'Producing Lenses With 3D Printers,' 'Teaching with Open Hardware Submarines,' 'An Open Hardware Platform for USB Firmware Updates and General USB Development,' and more."
Mr. Perens has promised to be around tonight to answer any questions readers might have.
Licensing - copyleft? (Score:5, Interesting)
What are the current licensing options for open hardware? Has anyone found a "copyleft" equivalent?
About a decade ago, this issue was discussed at length on the OpenCores mailing lists. At the time, the best we (engineers) could come up with was that the design documents/files could be copyrighted and so GPLd, but there was no way to oblige that a physical device be distributed with design data.
It seemed to be okay for someone to take a design, make secret modifications, build it and distributed a physical product that could not be replicated. The obligation to share modifications only kicked in when the GPLd design data was distributed, not when the physical product was distributed. Is this the case, or has a real legal mind figured out that we were wrong?
Re:I'm here (Score:4, Interesting)
I find pdf doesn't work that well on a small screen. Either you design the pdf for A6 sized paper, which doesn't look so good printed on A4 or on my 24" desktop screen, or you end up with something on your portable device that is either too small to read or requires lots of sideways scrolling. Maybe you should do the journal in something like docbook format, and use that to generate pdfs and ebook files.
Re:Fab lab network (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, not just bring projects together, but avoid some of the mistakes we made with Open Source. Like have "recommended" licenses, with the recommended set really small, so we don't have the problem of 80 licenses accepted by the Open Source Initiative and no "recommended" list because we can't dis-recommend a license without offending someone. And not start out by building a schism between Free Software and Open Source. I could rant about all of the things that went wrong for a while...
We could use good videos for smart people. The coverage we have so far panders to a lowest common denominator of viewers. I'd be delighted if someone was able to make better videos. If I tried to do it, though, it would eat all of my time.
Yes, we definitely want to stimulate a new movement, and put both thought and experience into it.
Re:I'm here (Score:4, Interesting)