I’m uncertain if the GPLv3 [1], or something from Creative Commons [3], like the CC-BY-SA [2] license, would be appropriate for open source hardware. I’ve come across the CERN-OHL-S [4], which appears interesting, but I’ve never encountered it in the wild, so I’m wary of it’s apparent obscurity.

References
  1. Type: Webpage. Title: “GNU General Public License”. Publisher: “GNU Operating System”. Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:29Z. URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html.
  2. Type: Webpage. Title: “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International”. Publisher: “Creative Commons”. Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:30Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
  3. Type: Webpage. Title: “About CC Licenses”. Publisher: “Creative Commons”. Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:31Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/.
  4. Type: Text. Title: “CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal”. Publisher: “CERN”. Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:33Z. URI: https://gitlab.com/ohwr/project/cernohl/-/wikis/uploads/819d71bea3458f71fba6cf4fb0f2de6b/cern_ohl_s_v2.txt.
  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I’ve always liked the idea of gpl. It’s open for anyone who wants to play fair, but prevents large corporations from profiting off of your work. They can always license it from you of course, you just get to negotiate that.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      It’s open for anyone who wants to play fair, but prevents large corporations from profiting off of your work.

      It was just explained to me by many on Lemmy that not just GPL but the actual definition of Open Source requires that you allow large corporations to profit off your work.

      I was extremely surprised to find that out. For decades I thought only the BSD license allowed corporations to profit from your work. It turns out that you can’t even technically call your product Open Source if you don’t allow corporations to exploit your work.

      I thought it was crazy but I was dogpiled with links showing I was wrong.

      • lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Where are you hearing this?? The FSF has an entire licence dedicated to limiting commercial use of your software (the a-gpl), gpl-3 is also much more limiting which us why linus doesnt use it for the kernal, but few would call gpl-3 not open source. Open source means people can modify and redistribute your code, theres nothing preventing you from saying “This code is free (as in beer and freedom). Keep it that way)”

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          It was in this thread here:

          https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21153303

          A company was calling their product Open Source because they published the source code and allowed anyone to modify it. But they didn’t want Google taking their work for free. Lemmy users called them scammers/open source washers because they didn’t want their work exploited by large corporations.

          I still find it weird that Open Source defenders are adamant that you must allow large corporations to exploit your work or you are a fraud. I had no idea.