[Arm-netbook] need help! getting a bit overwhelmed on lists.oshwa.org

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 23. August 2016 23.46.33 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-August/001865.html
> 
> very similarly minded people, unfortunately using the word "open
> source" in reference to what are clearly libre principles.  if anyone
> has time i'd really appreciate some help... but also i think people
> here would genuinely appreciate the opportunity to debate, also
> there's people there from "open ecology" and many other areas.

I might subscribe and add something. Even if I end up telling people things 
they already know and/or don't care about, I can always recycle the content 
for a blog post later. ;-)

Hardware people like to tell everyone that hardware isn't software. I was 
looking at Verilog tutorials and resources a while ago and "this isn't like 
programming" came up quite a bit. (I suspect that many people writing such 
things haven't done the kind of programming that computer science graduates 
will have done: we don't spend three or four years dabbling in C and Visual 
Basic. They wouldn't write such things if they knew about logic programming, 
functional programming, software specification languages, and so on.)

But while I think that there is agreement (or acceptance) that the rules are 
different with hardware, that patents tend to be used to limit "cloning" of 
products, licences like the CERN Open Hardware Licence attempt to oblige those 
using "open source hardware" designs to make and distribute products under 
certain conditions. On the one hand, people say that you can at most only 
infringe the copyright of the designs if you just take them and make a 
"cloned" product (which is why they like patents), whereas the CERN OHL 
actually seems to assume that you can impose conditions on the production of a 
design through a copyright licence.

(Also, patents get used to define how the product is made when trying to 
prevent "cloning", which is supposedly what various industries rely on instead 
of copyright, even though I imagine that some industries may be seeking highly 
unethical patents that do nothing more than describe discoveries.)

Arguing about naming could be a waste of time. If "open source hardware" gets 
some kind of message across without misunderstanding, then maybe it is 
sufficient. However, having seen use of "open hardware" discouraged and "open 
source hardware" encouraged instead, I predict a similar level of wider 
confusion and uncertainty as the widely-debased term "open source" attached to 
"hardware" gets used in all sorts of unintended ways. "Open" plus something is 
also rather untrustworthy: it may have referred to interoperability a while 
ago, but now it gives no guarantees at all; terms like "open standards" have 
tried to retain their credibility, but there are still controversies about 
"RAND", "FRAND" and other nasty traps that give claims of openness little face 
value.

Paul