Tag Archives: FOSS

Creative Commons

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There are several flavors of the Creative Commons license.  I am going to look at the attribution and attribution share alike licenses.

Both licenses are very similar to the modified BSD license and are more explicit about what rights are conveyed by the license. Both require attribution to the author without endorsement from the author.

The share alike requires any derivative works be licensed with the same license or a compatible one.

For this project, I don’t see any advantage this gives me for the final product.  I hope to build and sell these programmers, but if someone else does for a decent price, I would still benefit.

I have to pick a license or make it public domain or someone else could license or patent it in a way that would restrict me or anybody else from building and selling it.

I am applying common design principals in this project. I do not believe there will be anything unique enough to patent.

Modified BSD license for Hardware

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The Modified BSD license is pretty much the same as the MIT license plus it prohibits using the name of the copyright holder for promotion.

I am getting most of my information about these licenses from here.

For myself, I don’t care if someone uses my name for promotion.  This license doesn’t help me over the MIT license.

If someone else submits designs, or software to the project, they may use this license without any conflict with the MIT license.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

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There are a lot of hardware and software designs that can be used for your own project. Sometimes this design may fit your needs without any modifications. Of course you could also end up spending more time modifying the design than you would have spent designing it yourself.

Research is important when deciding whether or not to use designs developed by someone else. It is important to look at licensing to decide if the license is compatible with your license choices. Readability and documentation are also important factors in the decision.

If you have the budget, you can buy the design.  There is also public domain and open source designs to choose from as well.

This project is not very exotic.  There is probably a lot of free and open source designs available that I will be able to incorporate into the design, especially in the software. I still haven’t decided on the licensing for this project.  There are several common open source licenses for software and probably similar hardware licenses.