Open Compute Pushes GPL-Like License For 'Open Source Hardware'

Facebook's open hardware effort adopts 'prescriptive' license requiring altered designs to be contributed back to foundation when sold

The fifth Open Compute Summit, a two-day get-together staged by Facebook's Open Compute Project, hosted several big names all announcing contributions. But contributions and contributors aside -- yes, even including unexpected new folks like Microsoft -- one announcement stood out: a new way to license hardware designs contributed to the OCP.

According to the blog post that describes the changes, written by OCP Foundation chairman and president Frank Frankovsky, the original license governing the contribution of hardware to the OCP was "a relatively 'permissive' license (modeled on Apache)," the Open Web Foundation Agreement.