FAQ
From Ohanda
Contents |
About OHANDA
What does "OHANDA" stand for?
OHANDA is the abbreviation for Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance
What is it?
OHANDA is an initiative to foster sustainable copyleft-like sharing of open hardware and design. It was first drafted at the GOSH!-Grounding Open Source Hardware summit at the Banff Centre in July 2009 and one of the first goals of the project is to create a label and to build a service for sharing open hardware designs.
Who are you?
We are a funny crowd of people (community) who are all willing to push the widening of open source hardware and designs.
Why yet another entity like OHANDA and not do it with FSF or CC?
Over the past years we have had a lot of discussion with both Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Creative Commons (CC) and asked them to extend their activities towards open source hardware. But both FSF and CC have deprecated our efforts to get them engaged.
FSF
> Hi Juergen, > ... > I am digging through the material from FSFE’s side. The > president noted that FSFE is focused on software, and given > that the organization is quite busy just dealing with that, > he would be hesitant to actively take up the topic. > > In short, FSFE probably thinks this belongs elsewhere. This > should have been reported to you a long time ago. > ...
CC
> Hi Juergen > ... > Creative Commons isn't likely to jump too deeply into this > space - the trademark idea is an interesting one, but would > need to be community owned, and not policed by an organization > like CC. We're more interested in what legal tools we might > have that can serve as implementations of community principles, > much as our copyright licenses are used in the achievement > of the principles of Open Access in the scholarly literature > world. > ...
In the meantime CC has started to support various activities around open source hardware and seems to become helpful and supportive where they can to help solve some of our issues. This is at least good starting point for further exploration ...
What exactly is Open Source Hardware?
Defining the exact terms of Open Source Hardware is still a quite young discipline in the open source universe. The community arround this development is heavily engaged in finding the right terms to nail this down. As for OHANDA we think that the closest approach to our understanding can be found at the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition .
Registration
How do I register?
The process of registration and obtaining your individual OHANDA Registration Key (OKEY) is still a work in progress. Please join the wiki and our mailinglist to help shape this in a reasonable way ... Please check this draft for the first version of a registration process.
Does it cost money?
No! The registration and application of the OHANDA label is FREE as in "free beer". We would be happy though to receive donations to keep up our services, but that is optional of course.
What is the OKEY?
OKEY is the abbreviation for OHANDA Registration Key. The OKEY is a fixed part of the OHANDA label and helps identify the device as a registered open source hardware device. Also OHANDA provides a free URL redirection service for each OKEY. The URL http://Producer_ID-Product_ID.okey.ohanda.org will be redirected to your products home page including the digital design artefacts and documentation.
Legal
Why can't we just use any copyleft license?
In short: copyleft is legally based on copyright, which can not be effectively enforced in the physical world. The equivalent would be patents, but patenting hardware to make it open is slow and expensive. You may also want to read this quote from an article written by Richard Stallman already in 1999:
... People often ask about the possibility of using the GNU GPL or some other kind of copyleft for hardware designs. Firmware such as programs for programmable logic devices or microcoded machines are software, and can be copylefted like any other software. For actual circuits, though, the matter is more complex. Circuits cannot be copylefted because they cannot be copyrighted. Definitions of circuits written in HDL (hardware definition languages) can be copylefted, but the copyleft covers only the expression of the definition, not the circuit itself. Likewise, a drawing or layout of a circuit can be copylefted, but this only covers the drawing or layout, not the circuit itself. What this means is that anyone can legally draw the same circuit topology in a different-looking way, or write a different HDL definition which produces the same circuit. Thus, the strength of copyleft when applied to circuits is limited. However, copylefting HDL definitions and printed circuit layouts may do some good nonetheless. It is probably not possible to use patents for this purpose either. Patents do not work like copyrights, and they are very expensive to obtain. ... Copyright 1999 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article is permitted provided this notice is preserved. Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation, the author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the original developer of such notable software as gcc and Emacs.
