Please use this guide if you do not have an open source license on your work. If you do, leave the one that you have as it is easier.
Thank you for your patience whilst we prepared a guide for open source licensing. The scale and severity of this global pandemic is a test our ability as a species to come together and support one another. As a result, we believe strongly in open source solutions here at Helpful Engineering.
In order to help everyone license their work properly, make it clear that it can be reused, and offer everyone a bit more protection, we have released this recommended licensing guide.
Considering the huge uncertainties in how society will respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to recommend permissive licenses where at all possible. This is founded on a desire to collaborate with established manufacturers and technology companies in order to create the best responses we can.
We have used Safecast's licensing structure for inspiration and content, which they have kindly released for use.
Everything needed or used to design, make, test or prepare the Medical Hardware or other Contributions to be made or distributed whether hardware designs, software, schematics or anything else is licensed under the CERN 2.0 Permissive licence (CERN-OHL-P).
That includes both firmware and any software that normally comes with the hardware or other item as well as software used to test it. We recommend placing a TXT file in the root of the repository, by the repository owner, with this license in it.
Software that is not necessary for the functioning of the hardware but may be loaded onto it, or be used by another device to communicate with it is licensed under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0. Previous versions of Helpful Engineering license guidance recommended using Blue Oak License 1.0.0. However, this license is less common and may limit their ability to use Helpful Engineering software or to collaborate with Helpful Engineering. Projects that are already using Blue Oak are welcome to continue to use it unless there is a pressing reason to change it. If a project wishes to use some other open source license, please check with #legal-ip-licensing.
We recommend placing a TXT file in the root of the repository, by the repository owner, with this license in it.
Accompanying materials such as instruction manuals, videos and other copyrightable works that are useful for but not necessary to design, make, test or prepare the Medical Hardware for distribution should be published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
A reference to this license should be included at the bottom of vital documents, and we recommend the following;
All copyrightable materials other than software, and everything needed to design, make, test and prepare the hardware for distribution, such as instructional videos and manuals, are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
As a follow up, we will be asking all contributors to acknowledge that their designs are open source via the following link.
Source: original message written by @Stuart Cobbe on Slack on 2020-03-23 and updated on 2020-04-12.
Transcribed for the GitHub repo by @devhawk.