Open Source Hardware And The Law

Last month I attended the third Open Hardware Summit in New York City.  With the growth of the community and the emergence of products that target people beyond core open source hardware enthusiasts, there was a great deal of discussion about what it really means to be open source hardware and also how to be both open source and competitive in the hardware world.  This post expands upon something that I only had time to briefly touch upon during my presentation.

At the end of my talk at last month's Open Hardware Summit, I urged the community to consider that open source hardware may be more of a political and cultural movement than a legal movement.  This was an admittedly fleeting reference to a discussion that will necessarily be a large one, so I want to use this blog post to begin to expand upon what I meant.  The goal of this explanation is not to provide answers – largely because the answers are not mine to provide, and even if they were I do not have them – but rather to attempt to bring a useful framework to the discussion.

Legal Underpinnings of Open Source Software

Let me first lay out some of the critical elements of the open source software (OSS) movement, which is often pointed to as a model for the open source hardware (OSHW) movement.  While OSS is undeniably a cultural and political movement, it is also a movement firmly grounded in the law.  Specifically, OSS takes a legal regime that can restrict sharing (copyright) and use it to promote sharing.  It accomplishes this through a legally binding license on the code.