Bruce Perens On Problems With the Open Hardware Model (arvideonews.com) 201
Bruce Perens writes: At the TAPR conference this year, I did a talk on why Open Hardware licenses don't actually work, and how it would actually hurt us if they did. I'm not saying you should stop making Open Hardware, I just want to make sure you don't assume the license works better than it actually does. Also, I explain why my latest project is 100% Open Source but the hardware design is more restrictively licensed than the Open Hardware Definition would allow. The video is here. There's a long prelude of talk about Amateur Radio stuff before the Open Hardware part. But you'll probably find it interesting. Gary didn't succeed with the Kickstarter to fund recording the entire conference this year, but he made the trip and recorded it with a multi-camera shoot anyway, at significant personal expense. If you like the video, please help cover his expenses. Even $1 would help.
Summarize it (Score:5, Insightful)
No one wants to sit through a video. Just summarize the issues. I'd love to hear the convuluted logic on why Open Source works, but Open Hardware doesn't. After all, information wants to be free.
Re:Summarize it (Score:4, Funny)
A text summary you could read in 30 seconds would not work, and it would actually hurt us if it did.
Re:Summarize it (Score:5, Insightful)
A text summary you could read in 30 seconds would not work, and it would actually hurt us if it did.
So does the video only run 30 seconds? And is it faster to rewind and repeat to digest the hard parts that it would be to re-read a document? And what about annoying co-workers by playing something with audio on it while they're trying to work? We don't all have headsets at work.
Also, while I'm not a big fan in general of "simple" explanations, there's a limit on how complicated an explanation should be when applied as a blanket statement.
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i like squirels, im hungry, ok what was i about to do?
On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.
Re:Summarize it (Score:5, Informative)
Your open source software needs to be compiled to run on the hardware. If you and I have the same hardware, we can share a compiler. If you tweak Chip A to have features 1 and 2 while I tweak Chip A to have features 3 and 4, one of a few things happens. We could just not use those features on software we both use. We could fork the compiler. We could try to work out dynamically adjusting the compilation for our feature sets. That's all fine, even as rough as that last one starts to be. But then we have to consider the 18 other variations among our group of 20 installations using Chip A variants.
All this goes more or less smoothly until some well-meaning party comes along with Chip A.1 that does 95% of what Chip A does, but a different way, and then re-expands the additional features their own direction. Then the cycle starts over. Meanwhile, we're struggling to maintain compatibility across Chip A, and since A.1 isn't too much incompatible we decide one compiler should work for both. Then along comes A.2 two weeks later...
So, yeah, information does want to be free. Platforms also want a target that while not entirely stationary can at least have some chance to adapt to the levels beneath them. Some licenses allow you to completely change a work and keep calling it the same thing. With open hardware changing the underlying implementation is fine. If you change the instruction set or change side effects of one instruction being issued after another for any pair of instructions then you've forked the entire environment that sits on top.
TL;DR: It's not that some sort of open license won't work for hardware. It's that it has to be a carefully worded license that fully considers how hardware is different from software.
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Apple/Palm type monocultures at one end of the spectrum, Android/AMD-Intel systems in the middle, and a wild unworkable unfragmented west at the other end. What he's saying is that too many hardwares spoil the software - and it's true. Just as true as if the Linux kernel were wildly fragmented, or people got all "innovative" with core software components. I suspect that the strict Open Hardware license in some ways fosters innovation and fragmentation, and that's what he's trying to control.
Re:Summarize it (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind of like how the ARM platform is a total flop that no one uses, right? Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege. Also, AMD and Intel use compatible instruction sets despite very different underlying architecture. (Even Transmeta chips from back-in-the-day could still run the same software.)
Openness and experimentation DOES NOT necessitate incompatibility. Closed designs don't necessitate it DOES have compatibility (e.g. vendor lock-in). If a new design does become incompatible when people expect it not to, then that design naturally won't get widely adopted.
The entire issue is overblown. Let openness allow technology to evolve and improve. Standards and compatibility will arise when the market demands it, and variation/deviation/special-purpose will also arise when the market demands it. That's the way it's SUPPOSED to be.
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Let's truncate this diversion (Score:5, Informative)
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Ah, but no simple summary here in a post of equivalent size. Sorry, no interest in paging through some stupid slides. Only morons think powerpoint is the best way to convey that sort of information.
I mean, really, would we be better off if RFCs were powerpoint? Much less video? Eliminate white papers! Get rid of research papers -- it would be better to just have a video or slide deck.
If you want to believe you are relevant, you'll have to do better than pimping your slide deck and a friend who recorded vide
Re:Let's truncate this diversion (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH... Bruce could have just let you get trolled.
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It seems that your main objection is that open hardware is basically public domain, and the originators have no power to efnorce any provisions. So I'm guessing that fans of permissive licenses, like BSD, would not have the same objections.
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The BSD license can still provide sufficient incentives for people to develop software, even if they aren't monetary. But when you have a bug in BSD software, you just recompile. I have perfectly valid schematics that as laid out are too noisy to make a good receiver. Rather than just recompile, I spend about $2000 for fast-turn fabrication of a 6-layer PCB with 500 surface-mount components. This is a strong negative monetary incentive unlike one that would apply to fixing bugs in BSD software.
So, we have t
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" Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege."
So would pay for ARM to develop new CPUs
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Kind of like how the ARM platform is a total flop that no one uses, right? Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege.
No. Having to pay ARM for the privilege is an important part of what makes the ARM world work. Not the "writing the check" part, but the "getting ARM Holding's approval" part. Nearly all ARM "customization" is just deciding which of the ARM IP packages to license, which means that a specific instantiation either has a feature set or it doesn't, but if it does the features work in a known way. Additional customization can be done, but it's rare and ARM manages it pretty carefully.
Say What? (Score:2)
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http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
I split two different points into two different replies. I should have made more clear this one wasn't a summary. The other one is a partial summary of it, and of the most important point in my opinion.
It shouldn't be too hard to read this one, though. I'm not sure how you're unsure of the point.
Re:Say What? (Score:4, Interesting)
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short synopsis of one of the most important issues from the talk: Copyright and patent laws don't apply to hardware schematics the way they do to software under US law. You can copyright the schematic and keep people from reproducing it without following the license. You can't keep them from building the hardware the schematic describes.
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You can't keep them from building the hardware the schematic describes.
So? If you don't want people to build it, then why would you open source it? I read Bruce's slides and they make no sense to me. Basically he seems to be saying that Open Hardware is a problem because it is Open.
Disclaimer: I have contributed several designs to OpenCores [opencores.com].
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Open doesn't mean public domain.
If I am going to put in 4 years and $50K expenses, it has to be share-and-share-alike, as in the GPL, rather than a gift with no restrictions to every big company and Chinese manufacturer.
The problem is that GPL-like terms don't work directly because copyright can't be asserted on schematics.
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The problem is that GPL-like terms don't work directly
The GPL is not the only open source license. I agree that Open Hardware is not a way to get rich by restricting who can use your IP. But restricting how people can use it sort of goes against the whole point of being open. When I contribute a design to OpenCores, I consider it a gift to the world, and I am not looking for compensation. If a "big company" or a "Chinese manufacturer" want to use it, that is fine with me.
That being said, I have actually got some job offers and a good contracting gig becaus
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If you can code it in VHDL, it's really software. There's a big analog world out there that you still need to master to make receivers, and also good transmitters even if Raspberry Pi folks have coded the modern equivalent of spark transmission. Even if you get the signal into the digital domain as quickly as possible, the digital part can still swamp the analog one with noise if you're not careful. And it's really expensive to deal with. What would be a recompile for VHDL becomes a $2000 board turn. So, th
Re:Summarize it (Score:4, Informative)
No, an architect's work can be copyrighted because it is artistic in nature, even if the underlying function of a home is functional. The artist, however, can not copyright the functional elements, for example he can not copyright the concept of a bedroom and prevent others from making one. He could, however, patent the function of a new room.
Schematics are judged to be entirely functional and you can't successfully assert copyright on them.
You can also only copyright some parts of software that are artistic rather than functional, see the Wikipedia page on Computer Associates Inc. vs. Altai for an explanation.
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If I'm someone who only wrote gibberish (that's how it's spelled, by the way) in the thread, you sure are replying down-thread from me a fair bit.
Hint: I both summarized a point of your talk (to which you're replying to replies now) and explained another issue with open hardware. Other people seem to be understanding my other point just fine, and a discussion has started.
The two happen to be in different posts. Sorry for the confusion. This is an open forum. Sometimes the discussion is altered in a way usef
OSD == DFSG, which expounds on FSF (Score:2)
I thought that "open source" as pitched by Perens and Raymond, was mainly distinguished from Stallman's Free Software
The Open Source Definition [opensource.org] published by Mr. Raymond's organization is nearly word-for-word identical to the Debian Free Software Guidelines [debian.org]. Each item in the DFSG expounds on an item in FSF's definition of free software [gnu.org]: DFSG 1 is FSF 2, DFSG 2 is FSF 1, DFSG 3 and 8 and OSD 10 are FSF 3, DFSG 4 explains how Debian applied FSF 3 to the QPL, DFSG 5 and 6 are FSF 0, DFSG 7 ensures FSF 3 applies even on a desert island, and DFSG 9 explains how Debian applies FSF 2 to collective works.
by the former's lack of restrictions on what the licensee could do with the software.
It depends on what exactly
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I didn't use FSF's "Three Freedoms" (the fourth came later) definition of Free Software in writing the Open Source Definition (then the DFSG, as you say). The main reason is that it wasn't online, online being a rather primitive thing at the time. The odd thing is that I sent my document to Richard and his reply was "this is a good definition of Free Software" without pointing out that he had previously written one.
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Yes.
I don't want to see you. I don't want to listen to your ramblings, no matter how good a speaker you are (most people are horrible speakers). And I don't want to see or hear about your cat. Provide a written transcript of the relevant things you have to say.
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I've seen a number of videos of him. The first was one about the Linux operating system. I've seen others and I'm not entirely sure but I might have seen him speak live at one point. At any rate, he's a little quirky but not a bad orator. He's easy to understand and articulate. If he's the one that I'm recalling seeing live then he's passionate but not really a zealot. So, it might be worth watching the video? I've not done so but I probably will.
I'd watch now but, I confess, I'm watching cricket. I've only
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cricket & baseball (Score:2)
There are some great similarities, as well as differences
Similarities - your catcher in baseball is called a wicket keeper in cricket - who stands behind the batter (called a batsman in cricket). Your pitcher is called a bowler (difference explained below). You have 2 batsmen in cricket and just 2 ends, as opposed to the diamond. There are some great similarities in practice - like both catchers and keepers tend to be good batters, given them following the ball all the time that they are fielding.
Di
Re:Summarize it (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I'm at work, so I can spare a minute here and there to pop in and read something and make some comment, but I sure as hell can't sit through a video here. WTF are these morons thinking? Honestly, this YouTube generation is really annoying; have people forgotten how to type or something? I can read a whole wall of text in a fraction of the time it takes to sit through some stupid video. Maybe we need to be teaching kids speedreading in early grades.
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This is why I hate YouTube. I'm searching for how to do something rather trivial, but I'm stuck on one little thing. Why can't I read in 20 seconds how to do what I'm looking for, rather than listen to some mumbling person go about asking me to subscribe to their channel, and do all the crap I've already done in order to get to the bit that I care about?
Hey YouTube Tutorial guys: I don't need a 5 minute video showing your crappy desktop wallpaper festooned with 200 icons while you laboriously type in a co
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When I fix a hardware bug, it's about $2000 for fast-turn fabrication of a 6-layer board with 500 surface-mount components. With software, you just recompile.
So there really are fundamental differences and the incentives have to be different.
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If you put a turn in, it's $2000. If someone else makes a turn from your schematics, it's their $2000. If they share their process improvements back to the project, that works great. If they don't, that's where the weakness from the difference between this and software bites.
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There's a really big learning curve if different people are to implement each turn. Much larger than for software, because gaining the knowledge requires all of that expensive test equipment. $50K for a shop is really rock-bottom, new quality tools cost more than $50K each.
Crowdfunding has been the most successful implementation of sponsoring hardware implementation, but it's a chancy thing. We have held off on crowdfunding until we have a design that actually works. Then, funding can cover manufacturing ra
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Individuals aren't the only ones who do open source software and won't be the only ones doing open source hardware if it does catch on. $50k in a company budget for the tools to work with a bunch of different designs, and $2k per prototype is well within the means of many medium-sized (50 to 500 person) companies.
I maintain the problem is when you put in $50k in tooling and test equipment plus $2k per turn, then that mid-sized company goes to market with a design tweaked from yours and never contributes bac
Re: Summarize it (Score:3)
You know Bruce..
As much as you are pushing back against people drawing parallels to software the more I read the more I have to agree with them..
What you are doing is selecting one specific case for your hardware and trying to use that to make a general point. That case is not especially general.
It is easy to find software cases where knowledge and monetary investments are at least as high as your hardware investments.. And the people who point out that your evangelical claims over opening software
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I've succeeded in reaping the economic incentives of Open Source development without having to sell t-shirts.
For Open Hardware to work, the same economic incentives need to work, and they either need to be supported by licensing or we need another way to do it.
If you're not interested in fixing the business model, do please stay out of the discussion.
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Strawmen make terrible marketers and worse engineers.
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Re:Summarize it (Score:5, Insightful)
Selfish is bad. Sharing is good. Sharing without rules is better.
If you are so ADD that you cant watch what is a very informative video then we need to boil it down to the 3rd grade for you.
Videos are the web equivalent of PowerPoint presentations. If you can't put it down in writing, maybe your idea isn't fully formed yet, or you're too lazy to.
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More than that, video of a conference or presentation isn't nearly as editable as text. Once you mangle your language or say it in a confusing way, it's said.
With text transcripts, you can revise with inserted notes, etc. It makes it better for what you're trying to say, and better for the person you're trying to say it to.
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The information that is presented is good, no one has claimed otherwise. But many people, including me, object to slogging through 15 minutes (or more) of inside jokes about people I don't know and other pointless babble in order to get to the actual "good information".
Re:Summarize it (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm reminded of "Installing a network PostScript printer on a Sun workstation running SunOS -- As illustrated through interpretive dance."
http://web.archive.org/web/199... [archive.org]
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You've got that backwards. It's ADD-addled people who want to watch videos, and especially make them because they're too lazy to write. Non-ADD people prefer to read and write, using their literacy skills.
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Is it also OK to discriminate against deaf people, who can't use the video or the MP3 file?
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The slides are online. The Courage Kenny Handiham program would probably provide a Morse code form of them if you asked :-)
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No, not really. Open Source works because there is a very low barrier to entry since the tools other than a general purpose compute are free, there is no cost of fabrication, there are economic incentives for developers even when they aren't monetary, and developers have terms available that can keep it free rather than making it a no-terms gift to big companies and child-labor manufacturers. Open Hardware licensing doesn't work to support those same terms, and the incentives are different because of the fi
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What, you'd rather hear from the horse's mouth than the other end of the horse?
Slashdot wasn't always this bad. Many smart people seem to have absconded and thus the S/N ratio is much higher now.
Why open hardware is hard (Score:3)
Open hardware is hard mostly for economic and some legal reasons.
1) Open source works because of copyright. There is no such thing as copyright on hardware. There are patents but they are expensive and (comparatively) difficult to get. Copyright is automatic and free the moment you write something. Not so for hardware so certain types of open source licensing are off the table immediately with hardware unless someone wealthy is willing to spring for a patent and be willing to defend it.
2) Even if you intend to give away the designs, there are comparatively few people who can do anything with them. The cost of equipment needed to make/modify software is a rounding error compared with most hardware.
3) Marginal cost of production for hardware is always significant and far higher than for software. For software it is a good approximation of zero cost to make another copy. Even the simplest hardware costs substantial sums of money to produce in any quantity. This makes it far more difficult for individuals to make and modify works economically. It's somewhat like back in the day when you had to actually own an expensive printing press to publish anything. You can reduce the cost of hardware but so far we don't have any way to make it as cheap as software.
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I think this misses some of the biggest benefits of open hardware.
1) Schematics and PCB artwork allow others to learn from the design and make modifications to suit their needs, or re-use parts of it to save on duplicating effort.
2) Open source parts (that is, the schematic symbols, PCB footprints and simulation data files) are really valuable. A proven part footprint can save a lot of effort and wasted PCBs.
Bruce is right, opening hardware is very different to opening software, but both provide benefits.
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I think this misses some of the biggest benefits of open hardware.
I'm not saying open hardware is bad. Not in any way. Merely that it is more difficult to do.
1) Schematics and PCB artwork allow others to learn from the design and make modifications to suit their needs, or re-use parts of it to save on duplicating effort.
All true. However unless they share their modifications as well there is no way for the community to benefit and grow. There is no easy way to do a GPL style license with hardware. You could do something like a BSD license but due to the economics involved in hardware design and production a BSD style license doesn't really help much. You might make it work for some relatively trivial designs but for something
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1. Open hardware is only more difficult than open software as far as the 'copyleft' aspect of the concept goes. If the whole deal about Open source was to allow improvisation of designs, and sharing of the information on that, then the 2 would be identical. At a chip level, for instance, if someone put out the HDL models of a chip, 2 companies (to be practical here) could take the same design and burn that code into 2 FPGAs, and then run w/ it.
Where the similarities end is that in case of software, the
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Now if we can just get MIPS going again to catch up. It's good to have a little competition.
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The problem here is that this isn't anything like programming, where anyone with a PC can do software development. Those $2 SoCs only exist because there's some fabs out there creating them in enormous quantities, and benefiting from massive quantities of scale. Building a fab, and then getting set up to create a $2 SoC costs literally billions of dollars (and still millions of dollars if you ignore the fab construction cost). And this depends entirely on this one company producing countless millions of
Hardware is now just an instantiation of software (Score:2)
Most hardware is software long before it takes physical form. There are designs and simulations that run completely in software. The designs and simulations are what people can open source. When we are talking about open source hardware, we are really talking about software.
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Huh? Can you show an example?
Google for SystemVerilog, Verilog, or VHDL. All complex ASIC designs are developed in these languages and the design is called RTL (register-transfer level). The company Synopsys has a tool called Design Compiler that converts from RTL to gate level netlists. The netlists are then converted into silicon.
But the entire chip is able to be fully simulated prior to the production of any silicon. Except for the circuit and synthesis (RTL->netlist) guys, nearly everyone else who works on the 'frontend' pre-silicon portion of a chip is doing nothing but writing software and running simulations. The software gets nearly directly converted into hardware.
Ah, that's why stuff never works these days.
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Google for SystemVerilog, Verilog, or VHDL. All complex ASIC designs are developed in these languages and the design is called RTL (register-transfer level).
Pah! I am well aware with those and they are hardware description languages, not software! For example, if you run some simulations in Quartus, it is emulating hardware, not running programs.
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Re: Hardware is now just an instantiation of softw (Score:2)
Exactly what I was getting at, I can't think of any professionally designed hardware in the last twenty years that wouldn't first be designed and specified in software.
Hardware is being construed too narrowly here. (Score:5, Insightful)
The original article, and almost all of the posts following that are construing the word "Hardware" very narrowly.
* An "open CPU architecture" ...all of these are "hardware". Sure, an open CPU design is problematic because you need massive software infrastructure to maintain compilers and such. Sure, an open silicon design is almost impossible for any of us to reproduce. Sure, most of us are not going to be making custom ASICS. But we *can* all program an off-the-shelf FPGA - or have a PCB manufactured - or figure out how to assemble a 3D printer from stuff you can buy in Home Depot.
* An "open silicon design of some kind"
* An "open ASIC design"
* An "open FPGA design"
* An "open PCB design"
* An "open design for a 3D printer"
* An "open design for a modular house"
So this conversation needs to be sharply narrowed if it's going to be about the difficult stuff at the top of the list without shutting out the very successful projects at the bottom of the list.
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If all you are making is a gate-array program, you have the low cost-of-entry of Open Source Software, and the ability to fix a bug with a simple recompile. Gate array kits for lower than $50 are available.
Contrast the cost of entry to making powerful, multi-band, analog RF receivers and transmitters. I need to have a spectrum analyzer and a vector network analyzer on hand, two precise frequency generators, etc. Check the prices on eBay. Make sure the equipment you buy has a noise floor lower than 120 dB an
Summary (Score:2)
The slide at 24:49 in the video summarizes the argument:
* Open Hardware licensing attempts to work using copyright but is unsuccessful in doing so. (You can't actually enforce an Open Hardware license in the courts, where the mechanism is a copyright on an electronic circuit. You can't really copyright a circuit.)
* Open Hardware licensing only works as the developers would have it work when there is a *patent* on the design.
* Patents are expensive to pursue, and not particularly attractive to people who wor
Same with data standards. (Score:2)
I came to the same conclusions when studying the possibility of "open sourcing" a data standard. Software + forking = good (or OK). Standards + forking = bad. Forking a standard, without careful control, inevitably kills it.
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I'm sure he could find half a dozen people with the gear who would be prepared to do it for the experience.
If that were true, there would have been half a dozen other people documenting the conference for "experience", but there weren't, so you're proven wrong.
Creators/artists of any skill level should not be expected to work for free for the "experience" or "exposure" as a cost cutting measure. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e... [theoatmeal.com]
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You need to make one of the reward levels being on the panel that chooses which women are attractive.
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He's not against it. He's describing problems that need to be overcome for it to work the way we'd like. For one, you can copyright a schematic but the copyright is on the schematic itself. To keep someone from building what the schematic describes or their own twist on it, you need a patent. Those are much harder to get for one thing. They also require different licensing language from copyright to allow people to use the patent.
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For one, you can copyright a schematic but the copyright is on the schematic itself. To keep someone from building what the schematic describes or their own twist on it, you need a patent.
But the point of open x is that you don't want to keep someone from building what the schematic describes. Yes, there are "open source" licenses that tries to limit what you can do with the source, but the main point is always that you can take the source and improve upon it. That copyright is needed to enforce this is newspeak from the GPL camp.
Are you kidding? You can't have "licenses" for things you don't own. If the work doesn't have copyright protection, then its in the public domain. If you try to force me to obey some "license" I can simply choose to ignore your license and use the work anyway. Copyright is necessary to enforce the license, like say the GPL. Without that license, I can take your "open" software and do anything I want with it, including adding my own modifications to it and selling the entire thing without giving anyone
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Yes, exactly.
If you just 'give stuff away' - people will take it - and because it's just "design" or "software", you don't lose anything by giving it away.
But if they modify it, market the heck out of it, get everyone hooked on the modified version and then lock it all up - then they will have (in effect) taken away the original design and locked it up so nobody can have access to it.
This is evil - and it's why many projects use GPL/LGPL rather than public domain, BSD, MIT licenses.
The crucial distinction i
You can't lock up hardware (Score:2)
Except they can't lock it up because it's hardware, not software. Even without a schematic, it's a trivial matter to reverse engineer the hardware and copy it. That's how the IBM PC compatibles were made (the only tricky part being the BIOS which is software). In a very real s
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For the most part, all x86-IA32/AMD64-based PC architecture hardware (except for anything involving 3D graphics, HDCP, the decryption and playback of protected media content, hard drive controllers, and pretty much anything involving the firmware of a radio chip intended for use by anyone who isn't a licensed ham radio operator) is Open Hardware.
There. Fixed it for you.
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until they decide their patent over the modified version covers what you're doing with the unmodified version and you have to defend yourself in court.
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We can get away with not using a shrink-wrap contract on software because copyright works on software and starts with all-rights-reserved, so we have a right that other people will need the license for if they are not to have the work as all-rights-reserved.
Copyright doesn't work on schematics and anything that is entirely functional. See the Wikipedia article on Computer Associates Inc. v. Altai for an explanation.
Because there is also software in the package, I might not need a time-of-purchase or shrinkw
Re:Who is Bruce Perens? (Score:5, Informative)
Who is Bruce Perens? And why should I care what he thinks about open hardware?
Bruce Perens created the definition of Open Source and spearheaded the Open Source Initiative.
He created BusyBox which is used on pretty much all embedded linux distribution and was Debian Project Leader at some point in the 90s. He also draft the Debian Social Contract.
In other words, he is kind of a prioneer in open source and spent quite a bit of time thinking through the implications of open sourcing. Therefore, I usually consider him having opinions worth listening too when he speaks about open/close source and licenses in general.
In no case he says that having open hardware is a bad thing. He is discussing how we should approach the problem to make the community most efficient and how licensing models for hardware can achieve the properties that we want in open hardware.
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You can say the same about Stallman, but that doesn't mean I take Stallman's beliefs as gospel truth, and neither should you do that with Perens.
There is no more a single "best" licensing mod
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I hear all too much of this particular comment. I've never known Richard to be unshowered or dirty. Richard is not neurotypical and does his best to cope with that fact. It's not his fault.
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Who is Bruce Perens? And why should I care what he thinks about open hardware?
He's the digital equivalent of a panhandler. He submits a story no one is interested in and then asks people to send him money.
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He is asking for support of the person that's recording/editing/posting the videos, "Ham Radio Now" http://arvideonews.com/ [arvideonews.com]
Gary, KN4AQ pays his own way and his own video equipment to put together some great videos of every segment at DCC. It's really worth it. Many people are unable to attend and this gives them the ability to view it. However this is a lot of work and it's not cheap. So a donation to Gary/ARVN offsets the cost.
Re:Who is Bruce Perens? (Score:5, Funny)
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Translation: "I'm still butthurt after nearly 20 years because someone who was willing to identify his /. account with himself clearly and unambiguously IRL didn't want to be misrepresented."
Turn your dial to KGFY and crank it up--I just phoned in a dedication.
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Oy! I'm a drug-addled pothead who doesn't accept Bitcoin, you insensitive clod!