Hardware Designs Should Be Free. Here’s How to Do It

At lowRISC http://lowrisc.org/ we aim to produce a fully open source SoC and produce it in volume. The aim is open source down to the HDL - that is the Verilog (or in this case Chisel) that describes the hardware. There is an extra step of place and routing the design for a specific process, but ultimately this relies on a process design kit for the process in question which comes with stringent NDAs. We are actually fortunate enough to be taking part as a mentoring organisation in Google Summer of Code in collaboration with a number of our friends in the wider open source software and hardware communities, so if you're a student and open hardware interests you there's an opportunity to get paid to contribute over the summer http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/gsoc-2015-ideas/

Circuit topologies certainly can be patented. "Copyright" is an irrelevant concept here. The IP doesn't reside in a copyable drawing or shape, but in the commercial value of the topology.

What matters isn't the graphical or notional arrangement of the components, but the fact that the arrangement provides a novel and unique solution to a specific problem and/or implements a significant new capability.

Licensees can then pay for the right to use the topology in their own products.

If you want to make your topology free, you can simply release it into the public domain. Prior art rules will then make it very hard to patent.

The various CC/GPL licenses make little or no sense in this context, because most hardware topologies aren't directly copyable without modification and tuning.

Besides, a lot of designs already use standard topologies. There's no patent on many standard digital and analog design elements because they're already in the public domain.

Some of them have been in the public domain for decades.

Chinese intelligence agencies are convinced NSA pits back doors in their CPUs and HDD, the NSA are convinced the Chinese are doing it to them. And every other intelligence agency just throws it's hands up.

This situation could easily spiral downwards to a Halton of chip improvements, and yet an "institution" such as verifiable open hardware could let everyone trust again.

Bitcoin is not the only one needing global trust.

As an example, we developed an advanced high power LED light source. The design took a year of engineering. During this time hundreds of LED's and a myriad of circuit technologies and driving approaches were explored. Thermal management alone required six months of iterating through a family of designs. Initial designs were tested and fine tuned with thermal FEA tools and physical test candidates were machined in our CNC shop for real testing.

Past that, some of the advanced approaches we used required designing and building custom manufacturing tools and production test equipment.

Just think about the cost, not just in man-hours but also prototyping, testing, materials, regulatory, etc.

So it is because of this and over 30 years in the hardware manufacturing wold that I say, with all due respect, that the view being put forth is rather myopic and naive. Fine for little Arduino type gizmos and perhaps even some chips but it breaks down very quickly once you start to hit what I am going to call "the real world". This is where reproducing or iterating a design might require an infrastructure in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and potentially deep multidisciplinary capabilities.

In the software world any 15 year old with enough motivation to dive into a large open source project can do so armed with a $200 laptop. They can learn and iterate at practically no cost. Not so in the case of physical products.

When I make software free, it can easily be forked, contributed, and can scale to thousands of contributors. Consider the cost in man-hours to write a patch for Linux.

Now I make my hardware free. How do you submit a patch to a piece of hardware? How many man-hours does it take? How do I test this said patch? How do I accept pull requests? Can a piece of hardware have thousands of contributors? It is definitely significantly less trivial, when compared to software, considering the special equipment one needs to design physical hardware.

A lot of the free software movement revolves around improving software because it is more open. If I release open hardware, I don't see how the same will hold true for free hardware. Open hardware is just a giveaway.

I believe hardware is more akin to art; no one submits a PR to the Mona Lisa.

At the time I was involved with Opencores and asked RMS about his thoughts on Free Hardware. He was dismissive, on the basis that it wasn't software, so the four freedoms couldn't apply to it, therefore it was out of scope.

It's great that he has come around! I suspect that he hasn't so much shifted his position, as gained a better understanding of hardware and can now see the applicability. If only I had been able to give a better explanation at the time!