This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

Open source hardware traces its roots directly back to the open source software community. Despite these roots, hardware is very different from software.  As a result, while some of the norms of open source software port easily to the world of hardware, some are an imperfect fit.  One of the areas of imperfect analogy is in the world of licensing. Fundamentally, this is because open source hardware is not as completely wrapped up in copyright as is open source software.  As a result, open source hardware licenses generally lack one of the two major features of open source software licenses.

The version of this announcement that ran on the Shapeways blog is below.  I just want to preface it with a huge thanks to my wife Jessica for doing all the real editing of this paper (as she does for all of the papers I write), Sherwin Siy for looking over this for me, Sophie Khan and Geoffrey Mann for letting me use their images to illustrate “non-representational” scans, Henrik Rydberg for designing the layout, Parker Higgins for inspiring footnote 11, and Shapeways (especially Marty Meyer) for letting me keep doing these papers.  I also suggest quite strongly checking out Professor Margoni’s paper linked to below for an EU perspective and Paul and Laura’s forthcoming paper for a real law review article treatment of this stuff.  I’ll add a link to it here once I have one that is not behind a paywall (if such a link exists).  Also, Justin Hughes’ paper on photography and copyright is really great.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.