The Open Community License announced by Prusa Research last week has inspired an even simpler alternative, the Simplified Open Community License.
Readers may recall that Prusa Research finally released their CORE One CAD diagrams into open source last week — oh, hold on, they did not actually open source the files. Instead, they released them under a new license, the Open Community License. Prusa Research has been concerned that other companies have been using open source designs to build hardware products, and created the “OCL” in an attempt to slow them down.
The OCL, a one page treatment, intends on allowing non-commercial and internal usage of the designs, but prohibit selling products made from the designs.
What’s actually going on is that traditional open source licenses allow anyone to use designs to make and sell products. The problem is that Chinese manufacturers can do so in a much cheaper fashion than Western companies, and so they tend to win in the marketplace. If a Western company, like Prusa Research or others, were to publish a design using the old licenses, it is inevitable that a cheaper manufactured version would appear using their open sourced designs.
The OCL is trying to walk back from traditional open source principles and place a number of restrictions on usage to prevent this from happening. It’s unclear how successful the OCL might be.
Now we see a severe criticism of the OCL by GitHub contributor Stargirl Flowers, herself a long-time open source advocate and senior developer. She has published the “Simplified Open Community License” (SOCL) in response.
It’s a satirical-not-satrical take on the OCL and its meaning. Stargirl’s idea is that much of the wording in the OCL is ambiguous, meaningless and redundant and is not required. She writes:
“This repository contains the Simplified Open Community License (SOCL V1). SOCL is a license designed to satisfy all of the goals of the original Open Community License while being more succinct and legally sound.”
Stargirl takes us through the OCL line by line and explains why each (and every) passage is unclear, redundant or even contradictory. For example, the OCL includes this statement:
“YOU MAY use, copy, modify, hack the product and/or its components as you wish!”
Yet later on in the OCL this is shown to be untrue, as there are in fact restrictions and you cannot use the IP “as you wish”.
Stargirl’s proposition is that everything stated in the OCL is, legally, no different from a plain old copyright. That is the form of the SOCL: it’s just a copyright mark — in the “long form”. The short form of a copyright is actually nothing at all, since copyright is automatically granted to any published work. In other words, Stargirl proposes that “nothing” is perhaps better than the OCL.
Having gone through countless contracts myself over decades, I can see where Stargirl is coming from. The OCL does have plenty of holes and likely would not pass the lawyer test. It is definitely inspirational, but it’s not at all clear that it will achieve its objectives. It might achieve more for marketing purposes than anything else.
Stargirl concludes with some sharp but perhaps wise advice:
“We are sympathetic to the obstacles faced by your business. At least one of us has a background in the music instrument industry, which is lousy with cheap clones of lousy guitars (and other instruments, if you can believe it). We’re fans of your products and are thankful for the work you’ve shared back to the community. However, according to our experts, open source is an IP strategy and not a substitute for a business strategy. We think you should consider doing some introspection on why years of blaming open source and China have not managed to increase your market share.”
Those empty years between the release of the MK3 and the MK4 are starting to look like a huge missed opportunity.
Via GitHub
