 Okay, next up we have Josh Triplett and Jessica Marnes All righty, so we'd like to talk to you a little bit about Licensing open hardware as opposed to just as open software So I'm Josh Triplett. This is Jessica Mars We're going to and I want to start off with some of the standard disclaimers I am not a lawyer Jessica is a lawyer, but it's not your lawyer And if neither of us are speaking for any company organization or any other Entity that we may be a part of we will assume if you ask questions. You're not either This is not legal advice Our experience is primarily with us law so that is where our citations are many of the things we're mentioning and talking about Do apply globally or to numerous countries based off of various treaties, but we would certainly welcome any corrections or Commentary from people experienced with the international equivalents or other related law and please do feel free if you've got an Urgent question or commentary to make this more interactive and have a discussion Otherwise feel free to ask questions at the end as well So as I said, I'm not a lawyer my primary day job is that I'm a software architect So let's talk about software architecture first So there's a lot of ways you could put software together You can put source code into the same source file You could link object files or libraries together from multiple object files or multiple separate libraries shared or static You could fork an exec a process You could create multiple independent servers communicate via remote procedure call Communicate via sockets of some kind even over a network. You could have a shared memory architecture between multiple processes You could have some standardized API is for talking between multiple programs for which multiple implementations exist and One interesting distinction here is that these various distinctions don't matter massively from a legal point of view if you're using Permissive licensing if you're using a license that says do whatever you want or do whatever you want as long as you give me credit for it Then it doesn't really matter how you put your software together. You can do whatever you want But where those distinctions start getting interesting is when you start using copy left licenses in that case There is an intent that you're trying to provide of saying this is the scope that I consider this license to extend to And there are various licenses that extend that scope to varying degrees on a spectrum you've got the LG PL which extends it to the the case of linking multiple objects together, but allows some More flexibility and more free passes if you're linking dynamic libraries You've got the GPL that extends through dynamic libraries and up to some other boundary, you know Details to be determined see court law see various courts in the future You've got the AG PL which will extend that out through servers of various kinds And the point is not to say this is where the boundary should be drawn It's to say there are many interesting points you could draw that boundary on based off of your goal and your intent One point I want to make here is we're not claiming in this talk to have all the answers Our hope is that we have almost all of the right questions And then some plausible set of answers that we can talk to you about So that's software architecture and software copy left and that's been you know While it may not be perfectly explored in case law at this point It is certainly something that has been well trodden by many a software engineer and lawyer for the last several decades So let's talk a little bit about hardware architecture and how that leads into open hardware So there are many different ways you could put hardware together as well and many different forms of hardware You could have some physical object that you have blueprints for this is the Voyager probe for example You could have circuits on an integrated circuit the individual pieces of the chip that You know fit together to make one integrated circuit This is the 486 for example you could have many components on a system on chip that have multiple integrated components that each go to may go together on the same physical Chip of manufacture, but at the same time are in some ways somewhat independent pieces put together So here's a relatively new So see this is a set of Haswell chips You you could have a set of almost software like descriptions of hardware in the form of an fpga That the fpga itself is hardware and it is in a way Interpreting that bit stream to implement hardware in a soft way You can glue chips together on a board via pins via some printed circuit board You could have the printed circuit board itself that's designed to connect many components and connectors together Or you can wire those boards together via any number of connectors from PCI to USB and You know on top of the ways that you could put hardware together There are many different forms of hardware as well, so Just like you can compile a piece of source code to get a binary you could have a CAD STL file that you then turn into a physical object via 3d printer or some injection molding or similar You could have a schematic for a chip that gives you the actual circuitry of the chip, but not exactly how it's laid out you could do a Partially compiling and partially manual process to turn that into laid-out masks for a semiconductor and then turn that into a physical chip This is the original four thousand four integrated circuit You could again have an fpga bit stream and then put it on to an actual programmed fpga and ship that fpga in a product You can have a pcb layout in various forms and stages that then becomes a physical pcb And so that's an interesting distinction that it goes beyond the notion of a compiled binary for software Because it's not just that you have a compiled binary you have a physical object some of the laws apply differently and Again all of these things are relatively easy to talk about when you're dealing with permissive Licensing if you're saying do whatever you want then the details don't really matter And most of the efforts going on around open hardware right now are based on permissive licensing So I think where this gets particularly interesting again is when you start talking about copy left and at that point We really have to start talking about intent. What is your goal in trying to use copy left for hardware? What are you trying to enable? What would you like people to be able to do? And we can talk about various boundaries. You might want to draw or various Pieces that you would say well going up to this point We would say copy left extends But I would say there's few people in the room that would say that just because you have a copy left license on a board That you should have to free whatever is on the other end of a USB connection But on the other hand if you have two circuits on the in the same integrated circuit Manufactured with the same mask on the that might reasonably have a copy left license extend that far and somewhere between there There's a line or even a set of lines for different licenses that we might reasonably agree on So in addition to those intents then there's the question of how do we implement that with software We can use copyright as the exclusive right that backs our Licenses that allows us to then choose what subset of those rights we license and under what conditional grant of permission So with hardware the situation gets a little bit more complicated and more interesting and with that I'd like to hand it over to Jessica to discuss the legal implementation of that Thank you now actually I need that this will be a challenge. I have two devices in my hands at the same time So hopefully as Josh was talking the wheels were turning in your mind You were thinking perhaps of parallels between software and hardware. Are there actually any hardware designers or developers in the eyes? awesome Actually, that's kind of terrifying Because I'm probably going to get this wrong is Josh mentioned Not my day job But anyway, since we have experience in software and in in licensing We sort of naturally look at the licenses that we know and love and that are OSI approved and think how can we apply them to? to hardware and excuse me Obviously permissive licenses are easy as Josh said if you don't really have to worry about anything except just giving somebody attribution or credit No, no problem Copy left is much more interesting and non-trivial because you have to think of things like boundaries And boundaries and hardware are much different than they are in software There are some close parallels like Josh was saying the perhaps two circuits or two cores on the same die That are on a board connected to some other thing You there's there's boundaries that are really far away sort of easy to see and boundaries that are fuzzier So you need something like copy left I think in order to Sorry, I'm gonna go over here We need something like copy left In order to open hardware, and I'm sorry that was a bad segue. I should have had this slide up earlier Um, everyone here familiar with copy left goals, right most important is probably enabling the study of the design in the preferred format Formaking modifications to design people need to be able to modify and distribute what they modify The person who originally came up with the design the license or should have all the same rights afforded to them that the licensee has and so That's something that gets protected or is insured by making derivatives available under the same license Not one of the official for freedoms But one that we've talked about earlier today is making sure that recognition or attribution of the creative origin of the design happens And then of course ultimate goal by having something under a copy left regime is to expand to the size of the open commons I think there's a couple of additional considerations that we want to think of for hardware anyway Hardware specific goals and those should be that any any necessary Components that you aren't going to build yourself or so non self-manufactured things Should be standard or readily available So nothing made of unobtainium or that's available only in minimum purchase quantities of a hundred thousand So I would say those would be I am goals for for open hardware I Josh was talking also before about how exactly we make these things work And we know that we use copyright for software Copyright under US law actually under all us grants the creators certain exclusive rights And the fact that people have exclusive rights mean that they then have something that they can choose to license with others so Really quick review because I know even though I don't know how many people are lawyers in the audience fewer than hardware developers, but okay, so Even so most of you guys probably know this stuff too, but in the interest of completeness. I'm going to talk about each of these Sources of exclusive rights for authors and creators so copyright patent mask work which might be one that's kind of new to folks and trademark So copyright just again is a refresher. There's five exclusive rights Three of them are probably most important for both software and hardware So that's reproducing the work distributing copies of the work or creating derivative works based on the work Subject matter for copyright There's a whole lot But really two are going to be important for hardware and those are literary works And that's probably are primarily going to be important for the software that is going to enable hardware And by the way, I'm sorry Assumption that everyone was thinking that I was I'm talking about electronic hardware I'm not talking about just a plain physical object that doesn't have any circuits in it Literary works and the pictorial graphic and sculptural works and then just for completeness in case anybody is interested in what the entire scope of US copyright law covers I listed the other subject matter The next source of exclusive rights for creators is patent Patent law and that gives inventors the exclusive rights to do four things make use sell or import the inventions And there's four areas of subject matter under patent law Most likely thinking about hardware machine and manufacture are going to be the applicable ones But process and composition conceivably could also have to do with hardware So you might wonder, you know open open patent patent excludes people Why would you possibly want to patent something that you want to open? Which is a legitimate question And the reason that I can think if you didn't already have a patent the reason why you might want to go get one is So that assuming that you had a hardware design that you had licensed under a copy left terms If someone wasn't fulfilling the terms the copy left terms of that license and you terminated their license You could still have rights under your patent To go after them for some sort of damages But patents again sort of contrary to free and open They're also expensive and time-consuming to get and they only last for 20 years But all is not lost so it's not it's not like patents are totally useless You could file for a patent and then never get one or Even not not actually filing for a patent just publishing your design can serve an important purpose In terms of keeping hardware free also and so that's you know the idea of Defensive publishing or putting something out there and making it prior art and I put a little plug down in the bottom corner My slide here. There's actually a presentation tomorrow from the what are they called the open patent project? We're they're going to be excuse me talking specifically about this subject So I would definitely check that out if you're interested. I know I'm going to be there, but Patents don't make a ton of sense, but again have to talk about them in the context of exclusive rights so mask works are interesting and Maskworks actually came into being in 1984 because of the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act Which international internationally Semiconductor Chips are protected under? Something it's called trips and what the acronym stands for right now is eluding me, but So close, but yes, okay, there's an S there too But anyway came came into being to protect chips And it's sort of a hybrid between copyright and patent it doesn't give you all of the same exclusive rights of either one of those But the important ones are that you can reproduce the mask work And import or distribute a semiconductor chip in which the mask work is embodied So it's kind of interesting the mask work doesn't give you any exclusive rights until it becomes embodied in the chip but then once it does You have rights to keep other people from basically cloning your product Interestingly, you might have noticed that the there's no language about derivative works there Maskworks do not give you the exclusive right to create derivative works And reverse engineering is under is allowed underneath the scpa So it's conceivable that someone could you know take a chip that I build and reverse engineer at our study It makes significant modifications to it and then Build you know their own and ship it and sell it But the one thing or one of the things that stands in the way of that is actually making ships is really expensive and really hard So I think at the time that this law came out or that this was enacted It was a bigger deal I think maybe it would only cost like maybe 50 million dollars to reverse engineer and make a chip But I think that figure has grown and exponentially since then And subject matter again a mask work is something that's fixed in a semiconductor chip That's the only thing that mass quarks apply to and Last but not least trademark trademark the exclusive rights associated with that are the exclusive rights to use a mark And a corollary to that then is the ability to prevent the use of that mark or a confusingly similar mark by another party Subject matter for trademarks a word name symbol or any device used to identify a product The thing about trademark as opposed to the other three sources of exclusive rights that I just talked about This is the only one that I don't think is a really good candidate for opening and the reason for that is that Trademark is it's associated with you your brand and your identity So you don't want people to be sticking You know your trademark on a product that doesn't live up to your quality standards but it also indicates a single source of origin which is Not really consistent with the whole principle of open development right which is a sort of decentralized And multiplayer multi-party model, but I felt it would have been remiss if I didn't talk about trademark at least a little bit So there it is. That's the last I'm going to talk about it So now that we have our foundation or we've been reminded of the sources of our exclusive rights in various Objects, let's talk about hardware and forms again So Actually go back one second For those of you who aren't hardware engineers The difference between developing software and developing hardware the biggest difference seems to me and again This is me as a lay person is that there are a lot of different steps involved in creating hardware and those steps interestingly different different tools are used different parts along the journey and different exclusive rights can attach at different places and To me that's interesting from a legal perspective because potentially you can put different licenses on things at different parts and Depending on where in the stream you're combining things. There may be different effects happening So now I can talk about printed circuit boards PCBs I think are a really good example of what I was talking about where there are these different steps that have different artifacts that get created that are Potentially protected by different exclusive rights at different stages in the process So start out with your schematic capture, which is basically just representing the logical design of the circuit Can't copyright or can't protect a circuit nuts It just it is it's the fact but the the graphical representation that I've put out here is something that could be protected By a copyright the output of this schematic capture process. There's I guess usually three one would be a proprietary design file another would be this graphic so something that's usually like in a PDF or a JPEG format of a visual representation of the circuit and then Netlist and component information files the proprietary file the design file and the diagram are like I said, they're protectable as Expressive works the net list and the component information probably aren't protectable because they're so functional But interestingly the net list and the component information are the important Wait, does this have? Yes, the pointer. Okay Those become the input to the second part in the PCB process Which is the layout where the designer is actually coming up with the physical implementation of how the circuits are going to work and It's not really dark in this room. So you can't really see how complex it is, but it's it's really beautiful Pretty No argument. I think that a certain degree of artistic skill and creativity is required to place, you know routes and figure out where components are going to go The output of the layout process are a series of files called Gerber files and what they represent Most definitely the fruits of that creative and artistic labor are Protectable by a copyright and since copyright gives us exclusive rights That means you could license them under a copy-left regime or any other open licensing regime of your choice And then last but not least those Gerber files get fed into the tooling at a PCB manufacturing house And they make your PCB you have this manufactured board that embodies the design the actual board itself Now it's no longer protected by anything Although I suppose if it was sculptural or really expressive in its shape It might qualify for protection under the pictorial graphic or sculptural works, but probably not Basically the only thing at this point that would be Eligible for any sort of exclusive rights would be any designs that you had screened on the surface of the of the board but anyway the PCB an example of the multiple stages the different artifacts that get produced and in this case they're actually all protected by copyright but Examples of the different exclusive rights that could attach at different points So silicon then is interesting We'll start with talking about mask works over here on the left. Whoops Dang it left I had There we go a picture of a mask work Remember mask works don't actually have any masks don't have any protection under that mask work Law until they actually become fixed over in the piece of silicon what you see on the right, but over here Just when it's existing is a mint a mask. This could be protected under copyright Right, and then over here on the right again final product Here you get the mask work kicking in and it's protectable under the scpa provisions but before a Mask work even exists before you start to build the masks you start out with the design of the chip and one of the things that I think is testament to how Difficult and time-consuming it is to produce or to design a Semiconductor chip is the fact that what has become really a large industry in and of itself in the tech industry is The licensing of cores IP cores Which are usually broken into or referred to as either being hard or soft but these are designs that are made by Third-party vendors or there's you know some companies all they do is cores other companies do a variety of things But the idea is that they are Pre-configured or pre-designed blocks of IP that can be dropped into designs thus enabling people to design more quickly You see up here Dang it. I keep wanting to push the other thing On the upper left This is a drawing of what's supposed to be a system on a chip and you can see Very distinct blocks in here. Those are cores These are supposed to those are representing hard cores and the things that's interesting to me anyway about cores and whether they're hard or soft is Well, they they affect the way that the licenses might work on them when you use them in a design the hard cores again, you can see how they're very distinct if you have a hardcore IP block that you basically drop into a design and you Interface with the rest of the design using standard interfaces to communicate then it stays pretty discreet stays by itself If you had a copy left license on that IP core It wouldn't be extending the copyright. Sorry the copy left terms to the rest Of the cores on your silicon, but what if you had a hard core that you put into your design and it turns out that you Couldn't use standard interfaces in your design. You had to make modifications in order to make that core work Well, then those modified interfaces would probably become a derivative work of the copy left core And then you would have copy left obligations spreading beyond that core and going at least to the interface that you had to do So requiring you to make the sources available for that Soft cores on the other hand are Well, they're more like software. They're malleable. They're in an editable format Down here. I've got a picture the same picture Josh had of an ASIC You can see there's definitely some hardcore logic blocks in here, but then there's a whole bunch of other Area that is more tightly synthesized There's been a lot more integration that happens when you're using soft cores and Engineers correct me if I have this wrong But the the nature of the soft IP because you're getting it in HDL You're getting it in the the human readable form describing the circuit is that actually It's going to influence the design the rest of the design and the other design the rest of the design is going to influence it They're sort of this interplay Which if you think about it in software terms, it's it's very much like co-mingling or what do we say? It's not even linking. It's like taking snippets and merging things together So I think if you're using a soft IP core, you're almost guaranteed to have a derivative work So again, you could have a spread of Copy left you could open up your design way big if you didn't want to have your design be open But you wanted to use a soft IP core What you might do is take the soft IP core and try to harden it up before you put it in your design I guess that would be one way that you could sort of try to minimize the boundary creep or the boundary encroachment, but Anyway, those are the differences between hard and soft IP as I understand them and I just thought that was really interesting It's worth mentioning as well that this is another place where your intent matters such that it's reasonable to ask As we develop more understanding of how to apply copy left to open hardware Where we want our licenses to extend we may reasonably want Hardware equivalents of the LG PL as well as hardware equivalents of the GPL with you know tighter and looser Boundaries for how far they extend and that would play nicely into this as well So I didn't think that I forgot to mention and this is sort of Unfortunate that you reminded me when we were talking about intent all of my great intent to have an open design is going to be for not Or maybe for not at the end here when I get down to Actually finishing up my design using my Eda tools All of the tools have proprietary libraries in them So when I combine whether they're hard or soft IP cores that I licensed whether it's you know I did the full design myself from scratch when it comes time to Combining them with the libraries from my Eda tools I may very well end up with a derived work that now is going to have license compatibility issues because like I said all of those Eda libraries are under proprietary licenses. So I have a couple of options I Could choose to license or you know make my cores available under a permissive license because that makes things easy or maybe I could make them under a weak copy left license or Another possibility not sure if we can actually Take this as gospel, but what if we had a Okay, what if what if we had a system at the equivalent of a system library? Exception for cores. So a core library exception. I'm not sure if you could read the gpl v3 as enabling that but If you could that would be great and just by the way the gpl v3 family of licenses Is the only or the only OSI approved licenses that mentioned ask works in them, which I thought was interesting So they were kind of thinking I had to hardware Related to the library problem that I mentioned for my soft and hard IP cores run into a similar problem with the FPGA down below and so we've got the Pieces to look in it's built over here. You got a program with a bit stream There there is no open tooling from any of the major FPGA vendors That to enable the the creation of a bit stream to put into the FPGA So once again, I could have done all of my other design have it be opened, but then when I okay, you're gonna correct me Yes Yes, well in that are you from the ice storm project? Okay, but you know about it. No, no, okay, so so here's a problem. So so again I can't program my my my FPGA without getting in trouble. So really the best that you could possibly do I think if you were coming up with the design for For an FPGA would be to make your HDL designs available under an open license And then provide instructions for your users how they could create the rest of the design files And how they can generate the bit stream, although that still doesn't solve the problem for them It's just moved it over to the right now They're the ones who are going to be creating the the thing that has the proprietary libraries mixed with the open With the open license design I suspect that the absence of Or lack of clarity around whether we have a core library exception is Why most of the cores that you see available under open licenses are either permissive or LG PL Because I think either of those licensing schemes sort of gets around the problem and yes, okay So open hardware there is actually an open FPGA the ice storm project guys Reverse engineered that lattice ice 40 FPGAs so they figured out how to do the bit stream And this is actually a picture of something called my storm Which a guy named Allen would created Fully open piece of hardware you can see the open hardware the open Hardware logo on it So if you were so inclined you could get all the get the schematics get the Gerbers get your files Over to your PCB house build your PCB order your lattice semiconductor or like what I don't $15 or something And then you can you can program it No No, the bit stream that that magical part magical last part isn't open not on Intel Sorry, but that's a great question and we ask our friends in the Programmable solutions group. Hey, would you open the bit stream so we could do that? But no it even lattice hasn't opened it, right? It's the guys at ice storm who reverse engineered it because again reverse engineering is allowed under the scpa, but no no vendor has Opened their bit stream If anyone wants to volunteer to reverse engineer and Altera FPGA or Xilinx, that's that would be awesome um Sorry, so back back to my hardware design An enclosure might be another thing that you have in your your hardware design so an original design Created in a CAD tool or it could be some like a scan of an existing object Whether or not your enclosure or your physical thing is going to be able to be protected in any way or whether your design Files representing the object are going to be protected depends on a Couple of things how it was created again, whether it was native in the tool versus a scan of an existing object I'll give you a hint if it's native in the tool might be protectable If you just do a scan of an existing object not going to be protected no matter how much skill or creativity or art was Required in making that scan you haven't done enough transformation to make it make it eligible And then whether or not your design file or the design itself are going to be able to be protected by anything They're going to be looking at whether it's totally useful or creative or you know where the balance is between the two and Courts would do a separability analysis to determine whether copyright was going to apply to anything In this case, I think we would just say that probably the the intel logo Is well it's already protected by trademark, but my design file containing it would be Protectable and licensable under a copyright Just the interesting thing in this example actually this isn't an intel design This is some guy who is infringing on the intel trademark But I thought it was nice, and I'm not going to report it because it's it's in support of an intel open hardware project So I'm going to wrap up briefly before I hand it over to Josh I just want to talk about the state of open hardware licensing today So what would happen intellectual exercise if I had a chip today that was built on an open design and I sold it or I had a PCB that's built on open designs and I manufacture the PCB and I sell it what would happen or what what does the person who Makes the stuff have to do with it the answer is actually They don't really have to do anything if Unless I license the design under either the CERN or the Tapper open hardware licenses all of the other licenses that are currently available or that are designed for Hardware plus the GPLv3 Don't extend beyond the documentation. They don't extend beyond the digital they stop at the hardware Which I think is unfortunate because I think the goal of open hardware Shouldn't be just that you can build it But once you've received the thing that's built you should be able to understand how it was built So I just have a little table here summarizing You know the source availability requirements, which again, I think are really key whether or not The physical hardware gets treated like a binary, you know under the GPL is the source required whether or not you can use it For any purpose. That's an important one For some reason that the Tapper one doesn't have that as a as a requirement but also having having the license be compatible with Copy left software licenses because again, it's the electronic device I'm imagining that I'm gonna have hardware and software of working together So over on the far right I have my ideal hardware license see it has yes all over the place But I also I'm gonna make a specific a core library exception so that I solve my problem with the with the cores and Yeah, if anyone wants to take a stand at writing that license that would be awesome I'm actually the last person who wants to encourage license proliferation But I do think that to make open hardware truly work. We may need a revised license Now I'll turn it back to Josh So One key question you might reasonably ask is why do we care about license compatibility? You know as mentioned on the previous slide one of the issues is that the the Tapper open hardware license for example Does explicitly has some restrictions on what you can use the resulting hardware for and as a result It's a license that would not actually qualify as an open-source or free software license that you know The Tapper folks would say well, it's a hardware license those don't apply But I think that there's a key Requirement here that is becoming increasingly important. We want to support the ability to copy freely between hardware software firmware documentation specifications You may want to take some key piece of the hardware description and copy it into the spec in order to document something or copy something into the comment of a piece of source code or vice versa and The boundaries between those become fuzzier over time FPGAs become more important Hardware is described with software There's the the running phrase that you might have heard that software is eating the world and in some ways it's kind of eating hardware, but you know hardware is not going quietly and there's still a very Interesting subset that is firmly in the hardware design space So the ability to have these interoperate is very critically important. We want to have compatible licenses for these So I'm going to echo the same thing Jessica said that we certainly do not want people Going off and writing their own license from scratch any more than we would for software But if you are you know one of those precious few people who are doing revisions of a Existing well-established software license, please seriously consider accounting for hardware in those new revisions and In particular extending those provisions in ways that make sense such as treating physical hardware Similar to a compiled binary with respect to provisions like copy left So with regard to the open hardware see ecosystem as a whole We're still very much in the early days of open hardware Most production designs still do include some proprietary components Whether it is some part library or some portion of a circuit Or whether it's simply the fact that all of the individual ASIC chips on the board are not themselves open Then we're still very similar to the very early days of free software Where you know the GNU project was a set of more usable more friendly free software tools that sat on top of proprietary Unix systems and they existed within that ecosystem that was kind of carving out a niche of free software and Hardware is still in the same vein of here is a little niche of open hardware that is Carved out within a broader proprietary ecosystem and we want to push to make that more open So along those same lines one of the critical needs for open hardware that we'd be really interested in seeing people work towards Would be more open-source parts libraries, and we think copy left would go a long way towards Growing that ecosystem and building that up to be something that can interoperate with itself very well So, you know as said before we're primarily aiming to provide All the right questions rather than saying that we have all the right answers But at the same time we do have some specific recommendations So in particular for chips if you're doing any form of ASIC design Whether on the small scale or large scale if you want copy left the gpl v3 is currently the best choice of License because it's the only license that actually mentions mask works and covers all the way through to hardware It's not perfect since it does not necessarily extend the Provisions to force the distribution of source code to anyone who has the physical chip But it still goes further and fits better than any other license out there including the The creative commons licenses that have commonly been used for hardware, which don't really include any of those provisions For PCBs you could absolutely use a copy left license if you like It's a good statement of your intent and many people will respect your intent whether there is an Exclusive right backing it or not Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective PCBs as in a physical object form are not actually protected in any way On the one hand that's not necessarily a good thing for copy left on the other hand that can be a boon to the maker community that does do Reverse engineering and development of let me build a compatible board for this random chip So it's it's a mixed blessing We would definitely encourage the development and contribution of open parts libraries to try to get rid of that Proprietary substrate that open hardware is still built upon and if you are drafting a future Copy left license of any kind definitely account for mask works or any other similar present or future legal structure and treat physical hardware like binaries require the source code for it So with that I'd like to wrap things up and invite any questions or discussion Think we may have time for one or two questions Hi Josh I've a very basic question. I I don't even see the point of copy left Hardware I you know I've written stuff under GPL. I've put it out. I've been working lunch for 20 plus years But I don't it you know when I put stuff in copy left in software It frees up a lot of the barriers namely, you know People are free to do whatever they want with it and it costs nothing all along the way That's not the case for hardware. I mean even if you put on a copy left There's the the things I'm preserving are not the same and I'm not even sure the the value That I'm bringing to people by doing so I know there's an argument that can even be made that by preserving some of the rights I'm actually enabling myself to Create cash reserves that allow me to create more of what people like So you could also argue that by keeping your software proprietary that you are developing funds for future development And I think it's basically the same argument honestly We're in the really early days of open hardware. We're in the very later stages of open software The ecosystems look so different right now They looked so similar back when open software was first being developed that you know when you're developing Early-stage software and it is mostly duplicating things that exist but making them free the value of saying hey This is copy left. This needs to be kept open You know it seems like you have a smaller item of value and a smaller case to make for it But at the same time building up that ecosystem and eventually building up pieces of hardware that are difficult to replicate and Easier to work with in an open form that if we want to encourage a broader open hardware Ecosystem and encourage pieces of hardware that would otherwise be proprietary to be opened up Then we're in a position where copy left potentially gives us some leverage. We wouldn't ordinarily have so in particular You know using permissive licenses would You have you have to pay to manufacture it at the same time again software is eating the world in a way FPGAs don't require any additional cost each time you program them So as you're doing hardware development on FPGA Yeah, I use the Tapper license extensively and I believe you when you say that it doesn't meet the requirements You have can you provide me the the rationale for why it doesn't work? I'm not here It has a restriction on use it has to be for a lawful purpose Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, so that otherwise I'm okay Okay Yeah, it's the same thing that came up in the context of software with respect to like the hacktivismo license Where they said you can't use this to do human rights violations But the problem is the people who would do that don't care what the license says Yeah Reason why it doesn't qualify as an open-source software license, okay, thank you. Thank you so much. Josh and Jessica