Licensing of Parts

[impermaxvict]

Hello everyone!
In my opinion, it is almost mandatory for the success of such a site to provide a means of licensing parts under an open license.
One great example for this is Thingiverse, where all things must have a license.
Right now, my interpretation is that all parts on CadHub are copyright by their respective authors, which makes it almost impossible to copy, modify, and share them legally.
If one of the goals of this site is to share, work on parts together, and build an open community, I think it is very important to decide on a strategy for licensing parts and making this collaboration as easy as possible, now.
Since the intention is to drop CascadeStudio and all the currently published parts, it should not be an issue to enforce the use of a license for every part published on the site in the future.
The best option, in my opinion, would be to enforce a single license which is the same for every single part published on the site, for example the CC BY-SA 4.0.
What is your opinion on that matter?
Also, thank you for this awesome project.

[Irev-Dev]

Hey @impermaxvict,

#164 is relevant here. Part of the reason I wasn't sure about it and closed the issue is because with github integration (see the roadmap), obviously for any projects that are hosted on github we need to use the license in the github repo.

If you asked me months ago about forcing a license I would have said "let them select a license" as #164 suggests, but I am more open to forcing a license for non-github projects since I think any serious projects are likely to host on github because of all of the benefits of version control and PRs etc etc, so projects hosted directly CadHub will be more akin to gists and snippets. I'm speculating a little (Maybe I'm under estimating the amount of people who want to use code-cad who aren't familiar with git).

If we go with forcing a license I'm not sure which one, I get that creative commons is better suited to hardware, or raw STLs like on thingiverse, but the whole idea behind Code-cad is that the parts are software in themselves, so I think a software license is probably better, MIT etc.

Interested in your thoughts @impermaxvict.

[impermaxvict]

Hi Kurt,

First of all, sorry, I did not look at #164 before.

I totally agree with you on the license for projects hosted on GitHub or any other external site. These will probably be larger and more complex projects than "hey look what I made" snippet-like ones. For the latter, the specific license is probably not that important so it would make sense, in my opinion, to force a single one for all of them. This would remove the burden of choosing a suitable one from the user. (Since this seems to be not such a clear choice.) Additionally, it would make collaboration and sharing a lot easier.

If a specific license is forced, it should allow commercial use and not be too restrictive. This would also make adoption in industry easier. Your point about the kind of license (software vs. hardware) makes a lot of sense.
I also think that the MIT license might be a good choice.

There are also some guidelines from the OSHWA which seem interesting.

It would be nice to hear more opinions on the matter.

[Irev-Dev]

Sorry I forget to get back to this.I have a look at your OSHWA link soon.

[jmwright]

+1 on supporting licenses.

I've been in license discussions several times over the years, and it can get pretty murky in a hurry. Below are some thoughts from being around open hardware licensing discussions over the years. Take them or leave them, as I'm no legal expert.

As the OSHWA link suggests, there are licenses that are better suited for documentation, hardware and software, all with their own focuses and nuances, and can be interchanged sometimes but (maybe) not others. Some projects choose multiple licenses to cover the different aspects of their projects. I just checked, and GitHub does not offer hardware licenses when creating a repo, and the only Creative Commons license is the Zero. So for GitHub hosted repos, if the creator wants anything other than a license like MIT, they'll have to create the license file manually. That's not a CadHub problem, but it's something to consider.

CodeCAD is in a weird spot where the source files are software, but they generate things that are usually meant to be manufactured. Software licenses don't cover that eventuality, to my knowledge.

Could/should the license (or licenses) be added to the cadhub.json file? That would create a disconnect between the license on GitHub and CadHub, but it would allow CadHub to support hardware and multiple licenses properly. To have maximum flexibility for the future maybe there could be a licenses object like this.

"licenses": {
    "documentation": "CC-BY-SA",
    "hardwawre": "CERN-OHL",
    "software": "MIT"
}

[Irev-Dev]

Thanks for that insight @jmwright, those are some valuable nuances.

This situation of CadHub aiming to offer direct hosting/saving files vs kicking out to Github definitely makes things interesting.

Directly on Cadhub

I would rather avoid multiple licenses in this case for two reasons:

1. Generally I prefer to release things that are more restrictive and ease up if necessary from the point of view that it's hard to making things stricter after the cat's been let out of the bag.
2. Direct hosting is supposed to mostly there to serve the role of serving less-technical folk, and multiple licenses sounds more complex than it needs to be.

On Github

Having the license listed in cadhub.json does worry me from the perspective having them diverge. How does one put multiple license in a repo anyway? Is there a proper way to do it? just all in the one file but with some text at the start of each one that says what parts of the repo the following applies to?
I thought that maybe CadHub should make a cli tool, super low priority, but the main thing I think it could be useful for is scaffolding new projects i.e. cadhub create --cadquery path/to/file, just a thought but maybe it could also be used to generate a license file with multiple licenses to match the structure you've proposed in cadhub.json. I would want to learn a lot more before implementing this though, it's not something that can be half-arsed.

Also maybe we should make a Code-CAD specific license since the others don't cater for it well 😉 .