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Comment by helfire | Hacker News Reader

Creator here. I wanted to give people the ability to have the ability to print them out for personal use or buy from a seller. Early in the project someone attempted to commercially take it over so I chose this licenses. Is it perfect? no. You can of course design your own, but mine are provided under that license. See some projects like Elastic, Sentry, etc have run into similar licensing issues when trying to provide something to the community for free.

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I take no issue with you choosing whatever license you want. It's your own work, after all.

My dissatisfaction is only with the Open Hardware claim, present and prominent in what I assume is your website[0]. It has a definition[1], and your choice of license does not meet it.

I do not wish for the meaning of Open Hardware to be diluted, thus the comment.

[0]: https://scsi.blue/

[1]: https://www.oshwa.org/definition/

“Open hardware” is a pretty generic term and OSHWA doesn’t have a monopoly over how people use it.

This same weak argument gets used against "open source", and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim. Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse place for those who care about freedom, please.

Who is it making the world worse for besides the leeches who take it and sell it?

Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware.

I therefore do not see anything wrong with selling Open Hardware.

As everybody can do this, the hardware itself is commoditized, and society at large does benefit.

> Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware.

It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.

It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.

The usefulness I find in open source projects is the ability to learn, fix things etc

>It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.

but the author of BlueSCSI didnt do that initial design

"BlueSCSI created by erichelgeson is a fork of ArdSCSino-stm32" https://github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI

I did do the initial design of this hardware. The ArdSCSino just mapped pins from the bluepill to a 50 pin header.

'just mapped pins' is how one could describe a pcb :)

https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32/blob/master/ArdSCSin...

https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32/tree/master/gerber

Ok. You may want to compare versions then. It seem you're very interested in it.

> It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.

This is 100% true. Coming from a software side I was surprised that on the embedded and hardware side everyone just forks. I did try to contact the original arscsino project to contribute back but at the time it was idle and I got no response.

I've never heard of OSHWA. I agree with the other reply that Open Hardware seems to be a pretty generic phrase.

Hello,

Thank you for distributing the designs. The choice of license is completely yours to make.

That is what the comment above should have said instead of complaining.

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