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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing that Backblaze would release its drawings as open source, good for you!

But there's no explicit license declaration anywhere in the drawings zipfile and in fact some of the drawings claim "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DRAWING IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING. ANY REPRODUCTION IN PART OR AS A WHOLE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF BACKBLAZE MANUFACTURING IS PROHIBITED".

Maybe it's just boilerplate? Or maybe you really don't want to face competition in your specific industry. Regardless, an official open source license (even with commercial restrictions) would be much clearer than this.

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Yev from Backblaze here -> That is boilerplate for the most part, but it's open source, have at it!

What license is it under?

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

i might be wrong, but i'm fairly certain you have rights that you need to explicitly give up in the form of a license in order for it to be "free"

It's a list of commodity parts and some drawings. If you use this information to build your own pod, who would know and who would care?

If you start selling them as your own product, maybe that would be an issue.

I was wondering about this too. Lists of commodity parts might be treated like recipes, which are not subject to copyright per http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html, but the drawings are a different matter.

Seems like the Creative Commons licenses were designed for this use case: easy to understand formalizations of just what rights if any are reserved. Maybe pick one of those?

That quote refers to something very specific and you may not want to align yourself or your thoughts about licensing with that movement.

The creative commons and OSI are two excellent places to start looking at licenses. creativecommons.org and opensource.org

Not trying to align with any movement. Just saying that we give the design away. Appreciate all the feedback and we'll re-look at adding a license.

To be clear on our philosophy - we don't want to restrict people from building these for their own purposes, modifying them, giving away the design, selling the boxes, etc.

I'd suggest using the following Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

There's no trade secret here, since the drawings are published. You have the rights to build anything from the drawings, provided they aren't patented, which is another issue entirely.

Copyrights here only affect the actual drawings of the product. By default, the author is granted copyrights. That means you can't publish your own book with those drawings, for example.

But to actually build the chassis, go for it.

Ok I will email my attorney that "Some guy named atYevP on HN told me it was okay." ;)

Sounds legit to me...

I think you are missing the point. What you say here (in HN comments) doesn't matter at all. You should fix the license accordingly - or not, if this suits you better.

I agree with the parent though, if I were in busines and wanted to use your drawings, I wouldn't touch them with such a license. Even as a personal hobby project I would bug you for (official & written) permission before using any of the diagrams.

Other than that, it is nice reading about the technical decisions that go into building such racks. Kudos for sharing the knowledge!

I know, just funnin' :) We're taking a look at it and will update the post/docs accordingly once we figure out which license means less work for us :)

Having sold a company to IBM, I can attest that this issue would be a Big Problem. {Edit: I mean for any company that used BlackBlaze diagrams labeled "proprietary."}

A big problem for BB if they were to have open source-licensed tech and got acquired by a megacorp, or a big problem for a "kinda-sorta-licensee" of their tech once acquired?

It was a joke, emphasis on IBM 'Big" stuff...

That was the pun, yes, but my comment was about a real issue.

A problem for a startup using these documents without a clear license.

It would not be a problem for Back Blaze being acquired.

We are talking about the company that got a license to use json for evil

They should have sold those (framed of course) to raise money for the JSON folks (expenses and such).

Why, are you planning on reproducing the drawings? Copyright on the drawings has nothing to do with producing the objects described therein. You don't need a license to cook from a recipe.

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