On Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:28:42 +0100, Wookey <
wookey@aleph1.co.uk> wrote:
> I must admit to not appreciating what risks you want to be protected
> from. Seems to me the licence design is entirely about what sort of
> acts we wish to (attempt to) permit or forbid with the design info,
> not about butt-covering, but I may simply be insuficiently informed of
> the terrible consequences of publishing PDFs which could be used to
> construct very expensive bomb-timers :-)
It's much more that, if a company builds a thousand Balloons from the CAD
data, then finds that theere's a problem with them, as is entirely
possible, they (or their investors / creditors, if the company collapses
from this error), might think that suing the designers of the broken /
inappropriate hardware was a good way to recoup some money. This is
obvious folly, but people / companies do foolish things. I'd rather not
waste my time or money defending myself against such folly, and I
absolutely will not insure against it, since that only encourages the
buggers.
Sticking a 'no warranty at all, evereverever' should, I hope, do the trick.
> IMHO the schematics should simply be available under GPL, GFDL, MIT or CC
> licence. Which of those depends on whether we want to require changes
> back, or allow people to use them in closed designs. I vote for GPL.
I'm happy for anyone to embed Balloon in whatever they like. I'd like to
make people ask for the design if they wish to change it, to reduce any
proliferation of variants that would stop economies of scale in
manufacturing. I'm in favour of economies of scale, since I would like
Balloon boards to be affordable to people who want them, but can't afford
/ don't want to make a large batch. Such permission (and source files)
wouldn't be unreasonably witheld, I just think that a half-hour discussion
to confirm isn't an unreasonable burden.
> We could choose to supply schematics only with boards, even under the
> GPL if we so wished, but I am not in favour of that.
Not in favour at all. PDF schematics should be freely available. Perhaps
even licenseless.
> The tricky bit (in terms of level of openness desired) is not the
> schematics (which is why I am slightly surprised at your reticence),
> but the protel design/layout info.
Yeah. If I'd known that people wanted to derive stuff from Balloon2, I'd
have been very happy to discuss it. That probably needs to be formalised
and advertised.
Steve
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