Fully Open FIRST System

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

Very interesting concept.

I would guess that the GPL or some other similar license would be good. One which prevents the software from being resold without the source freely available. This prevents someone from using the code developed for FIRST in a commercial system. The license choice depends entirely on what things FIRST wants us to be able to do or not be able to do with the code.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

.. This prevents someone from using the code developed for FIRST in a commercial system. ...

Why prevent this?

[Astronouth7303]

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

What license would you use?

I'm not actually particular at this point. I'm partial to GPL or LGPL, but an academic license (MIT, BSD, etc) would be fine right now.

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

I would guess that the GPL or some other similar license would be good. One which prevents the software from being resold without the source freely available. This prevents someone from using the code developed for FIRST in a commercial system. The license choice depends entirely on what things FIRST wants us to be able to do or not be able to do with the code.

A business partnership would help considerably in making such an arrangement viable, where something like GPL would force the business to contribute back to the community. OTOH, GPL would probably scare off some businesses, and the only really reusable components are the robot controller and the control electronics.

The other issue is: What license works well for hardware designs?

[Astronouth7303]

After some thought, these are my opinions on licensing.

Software should be GNU GPL or LGPL. This is defined as anything written to run on a programmable IC, not to be fabricated. (HDL for an FPGA would be software by this definition.) LGPL would be primarily for things like hardware libraries which would be more or less required to be linked with the 'user code' (eg something akin to IFILib or WPILib).

Hardware licenses are somewhat of a stickier problem. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote on Linux.com about it. While developing free hardware doesn't work in the same way (testing, debugging, and using are somewhat more costly), it's still an essential part. Zonker also points out (and I alluded to) the fact that hardware and software are often the same. So I'm for all of the hardware being GPL or similar, although applying GPL to circuit boards which have non-free ICs included would be challenging. Something less restrictive may be required.

My $.02