On 15 January 2016 at 00:07, Andy Bennett andyjpb@ashurst.eu.org wrote:
A bit tabloid but an interesting article about open hardware licensing issues none-the-less:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-van...
Great story, but two things:
"But the particular open-source license he applied—Creative Commons CC BY-ND"
ND clause means the licence fails the Open Source Definition, so his designs are not technically open source.
"But in July 2012, NwAvGuy went silent. E-mails weren’t returned, and blog posting ceased. “He had gone quiet before—for a month or so,” says Boudreau. But no one has heard a peep from NwAvGuy in more than a year and a half.
It was always NwAvGuy’s prerogative to stop blogging or giving advice. But his mysterious disappearance created a predicament when the power jack used in the O2 amplifier went out of production. Equivalent replacements remain easy to source, but they don’t fit the holes in NwAvGuy’s original printed circuit board.
“He made it so you could see it, but not touch it,” says Seaber. That is, while Seaber and others had the files they needed to have printed-circuit boards made, no one but NwAvGuy had the original layout file, which would allow easy changes."
Given it seems there is reasonable motivation — HiFi companies are selling his designs — it would relatively trivial to re-enter those designs in your EDA tool of choice, before modifying and issuing the files output under whatever licence you please (or not doing).
Cheers,
Andrew