"Memory safety" is a concept that predates rust, but was certainly popularized by it. It refers to statically eliminating a category of bugs - those related to misusing memory - and all sources of undefined behavior.

Rust code without unsafe blocks guarantees memory safety, and when you're writing unsafe blocks you're culturally expected to expose a safe-api that upholds rust's memory safety guarantees for users who don't themselves use unsafe blocks.

Rust programmers (rustaceans, a pun on crustacean because the language mascot is a crustacean) tend to extol the virtues of memory safety [1], and are sometimes lax with using the word "safety" to refer to "memory safety". There are obviously non-memory-safety safety considerations as well (e.g. the other 1/3rds of security vulnerabilities. Or all the non-software uses of the word like making buildings that don't fall down).

Personally I think it's usually pretty clear how the word is being used, and don't find it annoying. But then I'm a rust programmer.

[1] E.g. pointing out that roughly 2/3rds of security vulnerabilities are caused by the lack of it.

Jurisdictions always matter, other OS licenses are also subject to local laws and its not a given they will be valid or interpreted as intended. Arguably it's the intention of the creator of the software that matters in how licenses are actually enforced (or not). So in that sense PD is fine. There are also plenty of easy cures for PD, such as making changes and then copyrighting and licensing that derived work as required.

The GPL forces you to license all your relevant software under restrictive terms (ie under the terms of the GPL). How people can declare that as 'free' I'll never understand, it's just ideological nonsense.

The GPL makes it hard or impossible to make money from your software since anyone else can duplicate and sell it. That's obviously neutering commercial use.

"partially source available" is maybe a bit long, but something along those lines?

My advice is to stay away from "FOSS" unless you're GPL, and "open source" unless you're an OSI-certified license. It's not that I don't think those terms apply to anything other than that, but using those terms invites debate about licensing and attempts to control language instead of discussion of your project.

"Source available" is a term that usually no one gets mad at.

Good question, and I sympathize.

The thread title as of this moment (subject to moderator edit) says "source available" which seems reasonable. So I don't think you made a mistake. "With published design" might also work.

I've got my own little GitHub page with projects that I share. They usually involve both hardware and code. I'm also not an engineer, but a scientist and electronics hobbyist, both of which have cultures of open design that predate the software industry. What I do with my projects is attach a MIT license, attribute the sources of any code or ideas that I borrow from elsewhere, and wish you good luck. ;-)

Indeed, I built simple industrial controllers from 8052AH-BASIC chips. And lots of patents are strange. Sometimes the examination process results in a narrowing of the claims to the point where they don't really read on anything.