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Open Source Hardware Is Not a New Concept (airgradient.com)
1 point by ahaucnx on March 28, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Hmmm, just because the schematics for something are available doesn't make it "Open Source". It needs a license which enables people to re-use, rebuild, share and potentially even compete with the original.

Just having the schematic available - but with no license - is more akin to "source available" than open source.

It's unclear what the license for the Air Gradient hardware is, as only the Terms & Conditions seem to mention anything related to usage, and it's piecemeal:

https://www.airgradient.com/terms-conditions/

Some of the points:

    * Reverse engineering allowed ;) Being open-hardware, we invite makers to extend our
    air quality monitors and explicitly allow additions on the hardware as well as the
    software.

    * Self-repair encouraged!
While that's better than typical closed source stuff, it doesn't sound like they'd be ok with someone wholesale reusing their design to launch a competing product.


Hardware and software is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

It's mentioned in our build instructions but we can probably make it more clear in the terms and conditions.

So yes you can take our existing design and launch a competing product as long as you keep it under the same license.


> It's mentioned in our build instructions but we can probably make it more clear in the terms and conditions.

Yeah, please do. :)

I actually took a bit of time to look and still missed it somehow. :/




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