[OpenTRV-dev] Licensing

[Damon Hart-Davis]

Hi,

I  just had a chat with Andrew Katz, a lawyer involved with the creation of the Solderpad (0.51) licence, a variant of Apache 2.0 that deals with some of the legal/IP issues beyond copyright and patents that Apache addresses:

http://solderpad.org/licenses/

From our discussion we determined that maybe the best thing to do to protect us from IP trolls and also to protect/comfort end users (commercial and non-commercial) is as follows:

All code (including the generation scripts for 3D shapes): Apache licence

Schematics: Solderpad licence (eg paste the text into the schematic like we already have with V0.09 and the Apache licence)

PCB: Solderpad licence by putting short text eg "Solderpad licence <URL>" linking to the licence text on the PCB legend

Generated 3D files (ie output of scripts): disclaim rights, eg add something to the output to the effect "we believe we retain no rights in this, but you may choose to regard this as licensed under Solderpad/Apache if you wish".

Any comments?

Rgds

Damon