Open Source Ecology House License Is The

For instance, furniture retailer Ikea recently released open source designs for a garden sphere, an urban agriculture project that can feed a neighborhood.

Open source design, the Maker movement and desktop DIY manufacturing are converging in interesting ways.

Licensing your work makes sharing faster and safer for everyone and requires less energy over time.

Open Source Ecology House License Is The

The license is the social contract a designer is making with everyone else involved in the project.

This contract, once set, is explicitly or implicitly signed by the other designers working on improving the project, by the manufacturers of the object and by its final users.

This social contract is what differentiates open source product design from a more traditional approach.

This contract usually benefits parties that know each other while it restricts any use beyond those not directly involved in the creation or build process.

In this classical approach, the license is mainly a commercial agreement.

As an open source product designer, I dont know yet who will be involved in my project, who will build it or possibly even what purpose the object will be used for.

The license can address commercial terms, but does not need to do so.

But in open source design, these licenses are also made to protect the users or any other person in relation to the design.

Today, more and more objects are given to you with restrictions on use, placing restrictions on how you can open and own those objects.

As a user you have very little say about how those things work, let alone the possibility to repair them when they are broken.

And this is not only related to the technical knowledge to do so but also with the legal right to apply any modification.

There is an easy way to determine if a license is open source or not: does it respect the 4 freedoms.

Access to documentation, build processes and sources are a precondition for this.

By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.

Access to the documentation, build processes and sources are a precondition for this.

Wed like to refer you to the section about economics to understand more about this, but we want to make clear here that any license that would prevent any commercial use of a design does not comply with the four freedoms.

Why Because this conflicts or puts limitations on the freedom 2 and 3.

Instead, you might want to have a look at our Proposition section to find a better generic name for your project.

Because of this, they sometimes overlook the need for attaching a license to their work.

So even if some work is shared freely among a group of user, at any point in time, the creators of that work could apply restrictions and claim compensations for the use of it.

Not applying a license to some shared work means trusting that the creators wont change their mind later on.

This is fine most of the time, until money or any form of compensation is involved.

By attaching a clear license to your work, you can get those problems out of the way and trust that nobody will change their mind even over time.

Even if youve said that you want your work to be shared, if there is no license attached, people will have to contact you every time they want to do something special with it and ask you for a proper authorization.