Re: gEDA-user: licensing (GPL or otherwise) for hardware?

[msokolov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Sokolov)]

Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I realize that open source is a religious matter for some, but guess  
> what: I work for a living.

Guess what, I do too, albeit doing firmware, board bring-up, drivers,
BSD and Linux ports, etc. rather than hardware design.  In the vast
majority of cases the software/firmware work I get paid to do is
totally worthless crap that no one in the free world in his right mind
would want to use even if it was free -- simply because the kind of
requirements that management likes to impose in the paid world are the
antithesis of what is considered technical quality in the free world.

In other words, the value to humanity of most of my paid work is zero.
Seen in this light, the time I waste doing paid work is time stolen from
Humanity.  And when I manage to steal back company time by working on
personal stuff while on paid time at a client's site (like I'm doing
right now), I'm actually doing a valiant deed for humanity.

On some rare occasions a paid client will have me develop some piece of
software or firmware that would actually have value to humanity.  On
those rare occasions I always ensure that the work gets open-sourced,
if necessary without the client's knowledge.  Other times I use my
clients' ignorance of the precise terms of the GPL and other free
software licenses and make them believe that they have to open-source
the kernel module I wrote for example, even if they really don't have
to.

> And when you're doing hardware design,  
> where the capital costs of a project can be quite high (gotta buy  
> parts, make and stuff PCBs, build enclosures, meet applicable safety  
> specs, etc), as opposed to software development where the costs are  
> in time alone, the notion of giving away a completed, ready-to-build  
> design is silly.

On the service-to-humanity side of my life, I'm currently working on a
hardware design (the Open source SDSL Debug and Connectivity Unit) which
is a fairly complex microprocessor system and in which I fully expect to
incur and am prepared to expend all of the costs that you have listed
(with the exception of EMC/safety compliance because I'm a law-breaking
anarchist), and even an additional cost of hiring someone else to do the
layout step because I'm not good at it myself, yet the project is
completely and totally open source.  You can check my current state of
schematic drawing out of my public CVS repository if you want.  It isn't
even GPL'ed or BSD-licensed, it's public domain and uncopyrighted.
I don't copyright my work because as an anarchist I find it hypocritical
to seek copyright or any other legal protection from the same
governments that I seek to overthrow.

In the case of this design its open source nature is a critical feature
of the gadget itself and its application.  The gadget is a tool for a
project whose goal is to open-source the SDSL Internet connection
technology.  It would be hypocritical for a gadget whose only purpose in
life is to help open-source something else not to be open source itself.

Bright Blessings of Yuletide,
Space Falcon


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