Intellectual Property
- Individual assignment: Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
- Individual assignment: Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920 x 1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, 1 minute max, 10 MB max) and put them in your root directory.
Understanding
Licensing is a complex matter as open-electronics.org suggest in their guide "How to choose your Open Hardware License". Making note of the difference between software and hardware licensing, the guide suggest to focus in the objective of your work: making money with something exclusive for you, share knowledge, serve as inspiration for other derivations, etc. As they detail, hardware licensing is more complex than software, that is due the ability to re-engineer every "machine" available; contrary to software which can be protected with just distribute executables files. Dependending of which is your work's target, or your target community, there are several available license types.
Types of License
Open Source Initiative (opensource.org), it's a public benefic corporation to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software. In their web can be found lots of information about Open Hardware related documents and license. From their web you can check which features you would like your license to have.
Other posibility is to check the Creative Commons website (creativecommons.org)>. There you can find a useful tool which will help you to create your license with every feature you want from a list.
Considerations before licensing
It's important to know, that after you realease something with a particular license, that license is now bounded to that particular item, even if you stop distribution. You need to consider that someone that use your project with a license bounded to it, may rely to that license for future events.
The Creative Commons website list some considerations on their "Considerations before licensing" for licensors and for licensee, so taking note of what license you are going to use its very important because you cant revoke if you already make a distribution.
License
I choose to use the Creative Common license. I made that choice because of their benefits: "All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work ” at least non-commercially I would like to share my work to many other studens from the Fabacademy or people that would like to improve my work with total freedom." More can be learned in their page "creativecommons.org/licenses".
Making selection
From their website I used the feature choosing tool. After choosing "Yes" in "Allow adaptations of your work to be shared?" and "Yes" in "Allow commercial uses of your work?" the tool selected the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International as the picture on the left suggest.
The license in the pics, its a quick human understandable review. The full document with all legal code is here.
Presentation
This image will help during final presentation day..
