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ikkalebob / NM-bionic-hand

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Is then intent of this project to be "Open Source"? #3

Open abetusk opened 4 years ago

abetusk commented 4 years ago

From your YouTube channel, you say "I want to take this opportunity to try and make this project as accessible and open source as possible".

"Open Source" has a generally agreed on definition that digital artifacts are provided under a free/libre license that allows for redistribution and alteration, even for commercial purposes. Here is a relevant quote from the entry on Wikipedia about the term "Open Source Model":

Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.

If the intent is to provide this project under an open source model, please provide a license file, preferably in the form of a LICENSE.txt file, and a short description of what licenses are used in the README. Some common choices are CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, the CERN OHL. The Wikipedia article on Open Source Hardware licenses lists these in addition to some others.

If the intent to make the source available, without providing the project as open source, please use the term "source available" instead of "open source" as using the term "open source" will cause confusion.

tylermaran commented 3 years ago

To provide a bit of extra information. The CERN Open Hardware Licence is a Copy Left license. And one of the main points is highlighted in Section 3.2:

You may modify Covered Source, other than Notices, provided that You irrevocably undertake to make that modified Covered Source available from a Source Location should You Convey a Product in circumstances where the recipient does not otherwise receive a copy of the modified Covered Source. In each case subsection 3.3 shall apply. - plaintext

Meaning that anyone is free to copy and use the source, so long as they also keep it open source. You can get see the different versions of the CERN licenses on their site, but maybe the best intro to the license is in this video.