I'm uncertain if the GPLv3 ^[1]^, or something from Creative Commons ^[3]^, like the CC-BY-SA ^[2]^ license, would be appropriate for open source hardware. I've come across the CERN-OHL-S ^[4]^, which appears interesting, but I've never encountered it in the wild, so I'm wary of it's apparent obscurity.

References

Type: Webpage. Title: "GNU General Public License". Publisher: "GNU Operating System". Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:29Z. URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html.
Type: Webpage. Title: "Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International". Publisher: "Creative Commons". Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:30Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
Type: Webpage. Title: "About CC Licenses". Publisher: "Creative Commons". Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:31Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/.
Type: Text. Title: "CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal". Publisher: "CERN". Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:33Z. URI: https://gitlab.com/ohwr/project/cernohl/-/wikis/uploads/819d71bea3458f71fba6cf4fb0f2de6b/cern_ohl_s_v2.txt.

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[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (12 children)

It's open for anyone who wants to play fair, but prevents large corporations from profiting off of your work.

It was just explained to me by many on Lemmy that not just GPL but the actual definition of Open Source requires that you allow large corporations to profit off your work.

I was extremely surprised to find that out. For decades I thought only the BSD license allowed corporations to profit from your work. It turns out that you can't even technically call your product Open Source if you don't allow corporations to exploit your work.

I thought it was crazy but I was dogpiled with links showing I was wrong.

[–] lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Where are you hearing this?? The FSF has an entire licence dedicated to limiting commercial use of your software (the a-gpl), gpl-3 is also much more limiting which us why linus doesnt use it for the kernal, but few would call gpl-3 not open source. Open source means people can modify and redistribute your code, theres nothing preventing you from saying "This code is free (as in beer and freedom). Keep it that way)"

[–] pReya@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The reason for the creation of AGPL is not "limiting" commercial use. It's there, so that a company commercially using your AGPL project is also required to publish its changes under AGPL, even if the only way they "distribute" the software is as a Application Service Procider (SaaS company). Because under regular GPL, this case wasn't covered, so big companies could use your code, modify it, offer it as a SaaS product and NOT publish their changes unter a free license.

AGPL specifically exists, so the rules around commercial SaaS use are clear – so I'd argue it's the opposite of "limiting commercial use".

See: https://yairudi.com/understanding-asp-loophole/

[–] lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 weeks ago

Sorry yea bad wording on my part, I was intending "limiting" to refer to stopping companys from profiting off of your work without limits (controbuting back to the comminity)

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