Four months after launching the alpha version, CERN has issued version 1.1
of the Open Hardware Licence (OHL), a legal framework to facilitate knowledge
exchange across the electronic design community.
In the spirit of knowledge and technology dissemination, the CERN OHL was
created to govern the use, copying, modification, and distribution of hardware
design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products.
Hardware design documentation includes schematic diagrams, designs, circuit or
circuit-board layouts, mechanical drawings, flow charts, and descriptive texts,
as well as other explanatory material.
Version 1.0 of the CERN OHL was published in March 2011 on the Open Hardware
Repository (OHR), the creation of electronic designers working in
experimental-physics laboratories who felt the need to enable knowledge exchange
across a wide community and in line with the ideals of “open science”
being fostered by organizations such as CERN.
“For us, the drive towards open hardware was largely motivated by
well-intentioned envy of our colleagues who develop Linux device-drivers,”
says Javier Serrano, an engineer at CERN’s beams department and the founder of
the OHR. “They are part of a very large community of designers who share
their knowledge and time in order to come up with the best possible operating
system. We felt that there was no intrinsic reason why hardware development
should be any different.”
The CERN OHL provides a framework for knowledge exchange that reconciles
open design principles with traceability with a clear policy for the management
of intellectual property.
“The concept of ‘open-source hardware’ or ‘open hardware’ is not yet as
well known or widespread as the free software or open-source software
concept,” says Myriam Ayass, legal advisor for CERN’s Knowledge Transfer
Group. “However, it shares the same principles: anyone should be able to
see the source (the design documentation in case of hardware), study it, modify
it, and share it.”
“The CERN OHL is an exciting achievement, with the potential of being
the lead licence for new hardware projects, like the GNU GPL has been for free
software,” says Alessandro Rubini, free software developer and coauthor of
“Linux Device Drivers”.
“Version 1.1 integrates feedback received from the community in order
to follow generally accepted principles of the free and open source
movements,” says Ayass, “and purports to make the CERN OHL even more
easily usable by entities other than CERN”.
“By sharing designs openly,” says Serrano, “CERN expects to
improve the quality of designs through peer review and to guarantee their users—including
commercial companies—the freedom to study, modify and manufacture them, leading
to better hardware and less duplication of efforts.”
“CERN efforts to build an ecosystem for Open Hardware certainly bode
well for more Freedom in the digital space,” says Carlo Piana, digital
liberties advocate and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation Europe
(FSFE).
