[hpsdr] Open Hardware License Law Review Article

[John Ackermann]

Some of you know that we created the TAPR Open Hardware License (OHL) 
primarily at the request of the HPSDR developers.  It was intended to 
foster the kind of community around open hardware development that 
exists in the free and open source software world.

I was invited to write an article for the University of Dayton Law 
Review about the legal basis for open source hardware licensing, which 
is quite a bit more complicated than for software.  That article has 
finally been published, and I have a link to it at:

http://www.febo.com/law/Ackermann_Open_Source_Hardware_Article_2009.pdf

To my knowledge, the OHL is the first general-purpose license for open 
source hardware, and this is the first published legal analysis of open 
source hardware licensing.

I wanted to give lawyers some idea of what's involved in creating a 
circuit-board-based electronic design, and I devote several pages to 
explaining the process.  As a result, this may be the only law review 
article ever to include a schematic diagram!

If nothing else, it should be a good cure for insomnia...

John