[ohf-licenses] Total newb asks annoying questions

[Terry Hancock]

Kurt Forsberg wrote:
> On 3/10/08, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> The conundrum that raised the question in the first place is that
> Small Company Z has the means to manufacture on a small scale and will
> put as much as possible back into the development community.  Megacorp
> Y has the means to manufacture on a much larger scale, price it low
> enough to put Small Company Z out of the market, earn a higher margin,
> and raise the value of the shareholders' portfolios.

If your interest is in protecting "Small Company Z" then I don't think
we can help, but...

If your interest is in making sure that "Megacorp Y" has a legal
obligation to make their modifications to the design available to the
community whenever they sell the product, then that's in line with our
intent.

That's what I call a "hard copyleft" as opposed to the "soft copyleft"
that you get with free software licenses (where the "product" is legally
a copyrightable derivative of the "design" and thus covered by the "soft
copyleft").

If you want my personal opinion, though, I think that small companies
will be the ones to benefit from this -- I don't think "megacorps" are
going to have much interest in Open Hardware for a long time to come.
The copyleft and automatic permission for manufacturing strongly favors
the "little guy" in the manufacturing field.

We are working in an imperfect field, though -- we're pretty sure there
are some kinds of loopholes that can't be closed (see Greg's comments
about "reverse-engineering" and "functional boundaries"), and we just
have to work around that, and make sure that people don't get false
expectations.

I think we have a pretty solid working legal model here (making a
modification of the copy invokes copyleft, copyleft requires designs to
be available), but there are a lot of kinks to work out. One of them, is
deciding just what is "source" and just how much of a scope has to be
covered by the copyleft.

Obviously, big companies are always going to have *some* dirty trick
they can use to undercut small companies, if they really want to. We
can't be in the business of protecting small business (only a government
agency can do that) or in deciding who's a "bad guy" and who's not. We
can just try to set up the fairest possible rules.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com