I’m currently planning the next version of my open source hardware project, which is a high voltage DC/DC converter licensed as CERN-OHL-W-2.0.
I know that there are people are willing to pay for fully assembled and tested hardware. But the current version has some shortcomings which cannot be easily solved, making a complete overhaul necessary.
For the next version I expect around 1000 hours of work for development and testing. But as I make the design much simpler, it also makes it much more interesting for companies to replicate it.
So for the next version I want to use two different licenses, a free license which does not allow commercial use and a payed license which allows it.
Currently all of the CERN-OHL licensing option...
I’m currently planning the next version of my open source hardware project, which is a high voltage DC/DC converter licensed as CERN-OHL-W-2.0.
I know that there are people are willing to pay for fully assembled and tested hardware. But the current version has some shortcomings which cannot be easily solved, making a complete overhaul necessary.
For the next version I expect around 1000 hours of work for development and testing. But as I make the design much simpler, it also makes it much more interesting for companies to replicate it.
So for the next version I want to use two different licenses, a free license which does not allow commercial use and a payed license which allows it.
Currently all of the CERN-OHL licensing options allow commercial use. I found that the TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License is the closest to what I'm looking for, but on their website it is listed as deprecated. I read, that the TAPR license has a lot of issues and there are some points I do not agree with.
So I got three questions:
- A) Are there any other licenses which disallow commercial use?
- B) Is it wise to modify an existing license? Like the CERN-OHL modified for non commercial use. And how should I name this, because this wouldn't be CERN's anymore but still uses most of their license?
- C) Some people argue, that restricting commercial use makes it not open source. For me, open source means that the source is openly available to everyone, which would be still the case. Only making profit from it would be restricted. What is your opinion?