Talk:The c,mm,n open product licence

There are several major points we need to address before I would like to start splitting hairs:

I would like a split up between (in order of importance): licence, trademarking the c,mm,n brand, terms of use webplatform, other legal documents.
The licence could be a combination of copyright, software and hardware licence as long as it is compatible with: creative commons by-sa or the opencontent licence and GNU/GPL.
The licence may also be a specific hardware licence. For other things we will select other licences. We need help with that. We may even use an existing hardware licence, but we need help in selecting it and judging whether it fits our purposes.
The purpose - according to me - is: by publishing a technical principle it is already protected from being patented. Yet, we would like to protect the fact that any derived work may not be kept from publishing. We think that the most unambiguous moment for publishing is on 'delivering' the derived product to a third party.
Know-how can be left out of the licence, I think. This is what people make money of, and that's good.
The community is not a platform: so membership, Qualified members and privacy issues. This is all platform terms of use. There will also be a foundation, valued community members might become part of its decision-making model. The foundation will be the 'owner' of the c,mm,n brand and be as (in)active as she likes.
6.4 I don't think we should ask for money in the licence.
I do think we need a business model for the foundation.

Christian Siefkes wrote:

I too think that it's important to clearly separate the License (for building the hardware) and the Terms of Usage (for accessing and posting to the website) -- all references to the c,mm,n project should go into the TOS, since otherwise your license would be unusable for other projects and incompatible with the Open Source Definition ("8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product").

There are also other issues where the current draft is incompatible with the OSD, e.g. the "warfare or strive" prohibition, which violates "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" and is likely to be unenforceable anyway. I think it's possible to bring your license in agreement with the OSD (which is necessary if you want to call your product "open source"), but it will probably require some work to do so.

A smaller issue:

5.2 (b) "include all new Design files that You create, as well as both the original and modified versions of each file You change" -> that's not a good idea, just imagine how ugly this would become if there are thousands of versions of a file, all of which you have to carry around all the time. The TAPR license has the same issue, I think.

TAPR License

Did you check the TAPR Open Hardware License (Wikipedia article)? All in all, it looks pretty good to me... --Christian 16:03, 14 May 2009 (CEST)