[Cryptech Core] Hardware license again

[Joachim Strömbergson]

Aloha!

For me the simplified 2-clause BSD license covers what I think is
important for an open hardware implementation. The BSD license or
versions of GPL (typically LGPL or GPLv2) are also what I see being used
for open hardware designs. I don't think I've seen Apache being used in
these situations.

That said, I am not a lawyer. And as far as I understand it, the intent
of "as is", and the openness aspects of Apache is similar to BSD
2-clause. If the rest of core agrees to this change I won't oppose the
change.

Regards,
JoachimS

On 2019-01-23 22:52, Phil Roberts wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> As I mentioned in an email before the holidays, we are working on documenting the licenses for our product and for the components that go into our product.  In working with counsel they advised that for an open source hardware license we would probably want something other than BSD.  BSD provides a copyright license for software but is not typically used for open hardware where one would like some patent coverage in addition to copyright.  In fact, while a copyright license (BSD) covers software, that makes sense, because software is protected by copyright, however, hardware is not subject to copyright, so the BSD license would not work for hardware.  In considering what kind of license for us to use for the open hardware components we develop, he recommended that we use an Apache 2.0 license with an addendum to provide explicit coverage for the hardware.
> 
> There are basically three reasons for this:
> - The Apache 2.0 license is well-known and commonly used in industry for software.  It has been adopted by many commercial companies as one of the popular commercial open source software licenses.  As such, a company interested in using hardware we built would find some comfort from familiarity in using a license like it.
> - It is a permissive license, not copyleft, so maintains the permissive characteristic that one gets from BSD for software.
> - It includes an explicit patent license (unlike the BSD license) which is important for hardware and software
> - It provides protection from certain patent lawsuits, i.e. patent lawsuits brought by those using CrypTech open hardware designs against others using CrypTech open hardware designs, which is important when dealing with a hardware product.
> 
> We plan to use this for open source hardware components we develop.
> 
> We would like CrypTech to consider adopting this license for its hardware components.  We as a consumer would appreciate both the permissiveness it would allow and the protection from patent lawsuits that it provides.  We think that other commercial entities who might be interested in adopting the CrypTech hardware would find this appealing as well.
> 
> We would also like to see CrypTech mark its hardware designs with the license it intends to use.  We reviewed the software as part of our plan to use it and found the software licenses all adequately documented.  For the proposed open hardware license, we would like to see a copy of the license in the LICENSE file and the README file in the .../hardware directory and a license statement in all of the design files. The README Board Revisions section should also include the year(s) the revision was made. The revision number in the README should correspond to the same revision number and release date marking on board, so that the physical hardware can be clearly matched to the corresponding version of design files.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Regards,
> Phil
> 
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-- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson
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