Licensing Preamble

Understanding, developing, and enforcing licenses, especially open licenses, is incredibly challenging. Some people devote their entire lives to this work. I, Charles Leggett, am not one of those people. I have done my best to choose licenses for each project that best meets my intent to invite open collaboration and incentivize individual, and commercial, success.

I have shared the various licenses that we use here, some of the projects that they apply to, and the rationale behind my choice. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about my choice on any of these, please contact me ASAP.

Licenses Used

CERN Open Hardware Licences

CERN has developed this licence to promote collaboration among hardware designers and to provide a legal tool which supports the freedom to use, study, modify, share and distribute hardware designs and products based on those designs.

These quotes and further information is available on the CERN OHL website.

CERN Open Hardware Licence - Strongly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S)

CERN-OHL-S is a strongly reciprocal licence. For example, if you release HDL files under CERN-OHL-S and then somebody uses those files in their FPGA, when they distribute the bitstream (either putting it online or shipping a product with it) they need to make the rest of the HDL design available under CERN-OHL-S as well.

At the time of this writing, this license applies to our Spark and APC projects. There may now be others.

The intention is for projects using this license to be fully collaborative. clectric has openly shared an original work with the world. We invite anyone to modify this design or incorporate it into other designs provided that they openly share their work under the same license.

CERN Open Hardware Licence - Weakly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-W)

CERN-OHL-W is a weakly reciprocal licence. For the example above, if you release your part of the design under CERN-OHL-W, somebody who distributes a bitstream which includes your part does not need to distribute the rest of the design files as well.

At the time of this writing, this license applies to our Protoboards. There may now be others.

The intention is for projects using this license to be modified and/or used as components, under the terms of this license, in the works of others. clectric has openly shared an original work with the world. We invite anyone to use this design, without modification, into their own work with attribution.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)

Open hardware isn’t very valuable if you don’t have the accompanying documentation. We use the CC BY-SA license on our website, wiki, forums, etc. so that the content is openly shared, under the terms of the license, for any use.

More information about this license can be found on the Creative Commons website

The MIT License

Often, the “secret sauce” is not the hardware itself, but the software that guides it. clectric is primarily in the hardware business. We want you to be able to express your creativity in, and benefit from, the software that you develop and run on hardware that clectric, and others in our SynthDIY community, builds.

clectric maintains a repository of software, called FLUX, that can be used on our community’s hardware. Contributions to that repository will only be pulled in if it is also open under the MIT License.

More information about this license can be found on the OSI website.