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Comment by mafuyu | Hacker News Reader

Open-source hardware licensing is not as straightforward as software, and funding isn't really figured out yet either. Hardware has significant costs to develop, manufacture, and sell, and many projects are niche or passion projects that can't compete with mass manufactured clones. Legal obligations of the licensing aside, the understanding is that the primary way to support the creator is to buy directly from them. Prusa has gotten pretty big and it looks like they want to make decisions about whether they've outgrown that model or not.

With software, it costs nothing to just git clone and build for your personal use (which also presents its own funding challenges). For hardware, there's gonna be a chunk of people who just want the product/functionality via clones, and you need to be careful to keep the community/project to grow sustainably. IMO, it should be along-side and not in spite of those clones, but you can see the frustration.

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There are no Licenses in hardware. There are patents but not licenses. For example you can license the Diagram of a circuit but you can not get a license for the circuit. you can get a patent if it's inovative.

Of course there are licenses in hardware. I have a small number of hardware patents and I certainly get revenue from licensing the use of my patented tech out to other companies.

Yes I said there are patents. Your protection does not come from the license in this case. The license in this case it's just a contractual feature. Your protection comes from the patent. IE, if someone uses your patent technology you dont sue them from breach of license because there is none, you sue them for breach of patent. You do not hold a copyright (the meaning of license above and what all refer too for exmaple GPL), you hold a patent. The purpose may seem the same but they are two very different legal concepts.

To get a Patent you have to apply to the patent Office, pass several conditions about originality etc) where as to get a copyright you just slap it to your work although the work in this case needs to be creative and not physical.

Believe me, I'm fully aware of the differences between copyright and patents. But the "open source" licensing isn't so different between the two.

Open source licensing originated with copyright because, in the US, it is not possible to release something into the public domain. Your copyright is automatic and you can't renounce it.

OSS licenses are an attempt to leverage copyright law in order to accomplish something that approximates the important features of putting something in the public domain.

This is not necessary with patents, because nothing is automatically patented and you can absolutely renounce patents.

That said, as OSS licenses evolved, they became more than trying to approximate putting things in the public domain. They started to carve out a space that isn't fully public domain, but also isn't fully proprietary.

It's this sort of licensing that could have huge value with hardware. And that licensing would rest on the legal rights of having a patent, just like how with software, it rests on the legal rights of having copyright.

So, in the end, the principle is the same regardless of whether the underpinnings is copyright or patent.

Although, since (unlike copyright), patents actually have a reasonably short lifespan, this effort is less necessary with hardware. It's entirely feasible just to wait until the patents expire and they enter the public domain.

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