Fully Open FIRST System

[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