This page describes the licenses used for content on Appropedia which include copyright, hardware licenses and software licenses.

Appropedia contains different types of original research materials. In some cases there are informative topic pages, how-tos and skill training materials to review and learn. There are also how-tos and instructionals to build physical machines that include manufacturing files and software for its operation. This is how we support the licensing process for them.

Documentation licenses Hardware licenses Software licenses

Documentation

Hardware

Software

From Appropedia:Intellectual property/Documentation licenses

Summary

• Content on Appropedia defaults to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, which means that you can use as you wish, but all derivaties must maintain the same license.
• Proprietary (non-open) licenses are only allowed upon approval.
• You can link to external content from other platforms. If you're uploading this material, we advise that you share under the same license as Appropedia so others can download and reuse it as well.
• You can embed to external widgets such as YouTube videos, but be aware that this content might be copyrighted so it cannot be reused by others and may become unavailable.

• Making digital copies of Appropedia pages (including full copies)
• Translating pages to share with a new audience
• Printing pages and distributing them as you wish
• Creating an updated version of a page
• Hosting a complete course on Moodle for a class or training program

From Appropedia:Intellectual property/Hardware licenses

Summary

• Open hardware licenses are applied to all tangible creations on Appropedia.
• The default recommended license applied to all pages on Appropedia is CERN-OHL-S.
• Designs on Appropedia are commonly incremental innovations and thus not patentable. But they can protect the innovation pool of all contributors by preventing others from seeking patents.

From Appropedia:Intellectual property/Software licenses

Summary

• We recommend that you use the Open Source Hardware Association recommended licenses (Apache, GPL, LGPL, MIT, or Mozilla).
• Software repository sites such as GitHub are well suited to host and license software, and you can always link to them on your Appropedia pages.
• You can link to external open source software on Appropedia.

Further resources

• Choose a license tool by Creative Commons.
• Software license selector by Pawel Kamocki, Pavel Straňák and Michal Sedlák.
• Open hardware licenses comparison table.
• OSHWA Certfication
• DIN SPEC 3105 open hardware specification by DIN (Deutsches Institute fur Normung)