DIY Science Equipment contest

[Josiah Zayner]

[Katherine Gordon]

Hello,

What is the best materials, growth medium and technique to isolate and grow IPS cells from skin?

What about using body fluid to isolate adult stem cells?  Anyone??

Thanks,

Kate

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Josiah Zayner <josiah...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Sebastian Cocioba]

Well then I have to put my 25 dollar OD600 bacterial turbidity unit onto the main burner. Good luck everyone!

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D

---

From: Josiah Zayner
Sent: 9/3/2013 10:22 AM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [DIYbio] DIY Science Equipment contest

[John Griessen]

On 09/03/2013 12:14 PM, Sebastian Cocioba wrote:
> Well then I have to put my 25 dollar OD600 bacterial turbidity unit onto the main burner. Good luck everyone!

From the TOU and official rules:

"Please note: in some jurisdictions, the publication of your project on the Sponsor Site could materially affect rights (e.g.,
adversely affect patent and design rights) that you may own in the project. You should make your own inquiries and seek your own
advice on this issue."

and from our sponsor:

" Build Their Lab Details:

Tekla Labs has surveyed 20 labs in countries across Latin America and found that over 50% needed the following common laboratory
equipment items: microscopes, media rotators, fluorometers, sterilization equipment, spectrophotometers, PCR machines, incubators,
water baths, hot plate/magnetic stirrers, pH meters, electrophoresis chambers, sonicators, UV lamps, tissue culture hoods,
centrifuges, chemical hoods and ELISA plate readers. Submitting designs for any one of these devices will make your design
eligible for the Judges' Prize in this category! Check out the Tekla Labs website, and see how your designs can make a real impact
for labs around the world!"

They mean, "By giving us your rights to produce your design or process or concept,
(and we may make those rights exclusive so you can't)."

All that boilerplate is enough to keep me from entering any normal contest...plus the competition
megalomaniacal angle. I prefer cooperatives.

The list of their survey results does validate much we've talked about there though.

Right here could become the main burner of productivity in inexpensive and open equipment design.
With a TAPR or CERN open hardware license on all parts and machines and GPL code.

[John Griessen]

On 09/03/2013 12:14 PM, Sebastian Cocioba wrote:

> Well then I have to put my 25 dollar OD600 bacterial turbidity unit onto the main burner. Good luck everyone!

teklalabs.com redirects to teklalabs.org and it's just a blog about the contest, not a company with
history products, people etc. WhoWhat is it a front for?

It's not obvious from the site teklalabs.org but this linked article is a good start:

http://www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2013/visionary/lina-nilsson/

There's nothing anywhere about IP, but MIT grads seem to learn about keeping it locked up.

[John Griessen]

On 09/03/2013 01:35 PM, John Griessen wrote:
> There's nothing anywhere about IP, but MIT grads seem to learn about keeping it locked up.

Scratch what I said about MIT. Doesn't pertain. Article in MIT magazine is all.

So Lina Nilsson worked as a postdoc at berkeley, and maybe her DIY equipment
ideas will include open hardware. Let's ask.

[Avery louie]

Im not sure about what you said john, but I might be missing something.

The first part just says somrthing that is always true- if you disclose your discovery or invention before you file for a patent, you forefit the right to do so.

The second part, as far as I can see, says nothing about them having rights etc.

--A

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[Patrik D'haeseleer]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:35:27 AM UTC-7, John Griessen wrote:

teklalabs.com redirects to teklalabs.org and it's just a blog about the contest, not a company with
history products, people etc.  WhoWhat is it a front for?

Tekla labs consists primarily of a bunch of UC Berkeley grad students, graduates and postdocs. They're local here, and I can vouch for them. They're Good People. No nefarious plans to take over the market in DIY hardware. :-D.

They've been around a few years, and have run another contest like this last year, focusing primarily on 3D printed designs:
http://www.teklalabs.org/3dprinting/
http://www.teklalabs.org/print-my-lab-results/

There's plenty of information about who they are and what values they hold on their website:

http://www.teklalabs.org/faqs/

Who is Tekla Labs?

Tekla Labs is operated by researchers at the University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco.

We are an open community of scientists, nurses, writers, engineers, researchers, and lay persons interested in quality, self-made laboratory equipment.

In what licensing format is access to DIY documents provided by the Tekla Labs Community ?

All DIY documents provided by Tekla Labs are open-source and published the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License.

However, there are many different models for licensing, including newer models that are being designed specifically with hardware in mind. We appreciate that our community members have different thoughts on how to best share their designs and we are working on a more flexible system to allow for several sharing options, including completely open sharing. Based on feedback we’ve had, we are really excited to include also the option for allowing commercial use of the designs to enable effective distribution at universities in low-resource settings globally.  If you have feedback on what options you would like to see, please contact us.

If you already now wish to submit a design under a different license than the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License, please feel free to contact us to propose an alternative license for your design.

The Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License allows you to copy, redistribute and modify the DIY designs, as long as you follow the license rules: 1) you must appropriately credit Tekla Labs and the creator of the design, 2) it is for non-commercial uses and 3) if you alter or build on the design, you may only distribute under this same license or a similar license. Please see the creative commons webpage for the specific wording and for additional considerations and limitations of this license.

All contributors must agree to distributing their work under this creative commons license.  All users must also follow this license when building, modifying and redistributing any designs.

The CC BY-SA license requirement is specific to the designs they publish through their own website. I don't see anything requiring people to use that one for the Instructables contest. And in fact, the Instructables website allows you to attach any of the CC license models you'd like to your own instructable.

The long official set of rules on the Instructables contest page is mainly Instructables boilerplate, nothing to do with Tekla Labs directly. They do send out valuable prizes to instructables writers around the world on a regular basis, so they've had to put some pretty solid legalese in place to cover their collective asses. Compare with their ongoing Kite Contest, for example:

http://www.instructables.com/contest/buildmylab/?show=RULES
http://www.instructables.com/contest/kite2013/?show=RULES

And yes, they do say that publishing your design may affect your rights to patent things later. Well duh - that is basic patent law. They do *not* claim any rights over your designs, as far as I can tell.

(The Instructables website does claim some copyrights over the content you post, "but solely in connection with the Service and/or our business activities (such as, without limitation, for promoting and marketing the Service) and/or to comply with legal or technical requirements". But again, that's boilerplate you'll find on pretty much any website where you post content - otherwise they wouldn't even be allowed to display your content on their site. Again, this part has nothing to do with Tekla Labs directly.)

Patrik

[John Griessen]

On 09/04/2013 01:17 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer wrote:
> Tekla labs consists primarily of a bunch of UC Berkeley grad students, graduates and postdocs. They're local here, and I can vouch
> for them. They're Good People. No nefarious plans to take over the market in DIY hardware. :-D.
>

> http://www.teklalabs.org/faqs/

But their non-commercial license would stop Sebastian Cocioba from selling his 25 dollar OD600
bacterial turbidity unit if it was exactly the same as the DIY from the instructable that gets
created in the contest. I grant you, that's not a big deal since the contest is about
using generic components to self build lab gear, not
how to make low cost partly 3D printed lab gear. Every DIY machine will have some hand work differences.
Calibration will come from some component in it. It seems they promote point to point hand wiring even,
instead of printed circuit boards.

All Sebastian would need to do is get some other enclosures and knobs and go around such a loose license
on the docs to build lab gear. The main point of Tekla Labs license follows. They're not promoting OSHW:

[Cathal Garvey]

That depends on "ownership"; if the contest merely requires that you
irrevocably grant a share-alike license to the design, you nevertheless
can do whatever you like with the design as long as "ownership" remains
yours.

If, however, you are required to grant "ownership" of the idea to them,
and they then license it CC-BY-SA-NC, then you'd need dispensation to
sell it, yes.

Noncommercial is a dumb, dumb clause, and it's only there to attract
people who don't "get" free cultural works, and think they can't make
money on them otherwise, to try it out and learn better. But I haven't
seen the Tekla stuff on this thread mention NC: I thought they were
using BY-SA?

[John Griessen]

On 09/05/2013 10:53 AM, Cathal Garvey wrote:
> But I haven't
> seen the Tekla stuff on this thread mention NC: I thought they were
> using BY-SA?

They call out the license BY-SA, but the below is verbatim from http://www.teklalabs.org/faqs

"In what licensing format is access to DIY documents provided by the Tekla Labs Community ?

All DIY documents provided by Tekla Labs are open-source and published the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Creative Commons License.

However, there are many different models for licensing, including newer models that are being designed specifically with hardware
in mind. "

Then below that, they write this out as their hardware license:

"The Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License allows you to copy, redistribute and modify the

DIY designs, as long as you follow the license rules: 1) you must appropriately credit Tekla Labs and the creator of the design,

2) it is for non-commercial uses and 3) if you alter or build on the design, you may only distribute under this same license or a
similar license. "

And then:

"All contributors must agree to distributing their work under this creative commons license. All users must also follow this
license when building, modifying and redistributing any designs."

So not up to par with freedom style open hardware.

[Cathal Garvey]

The remaining mention of non-commercial looks like a residue from a
less enlightened version of their FAQ, to me.

Is attribution considered nonfree? I've increasingly been considering
it so, but it depends on the "depth" of attribution called for by
Creative Commons; to what degree must one attribute versions preceding
the one immediately modified, redistributed or referenced?

Share-alike isn't nonfree at all though, far from it. Share-alike
defines the boundary between "Free" and "NonFree" in the open-source
software sector, so same principal applies here, I think.

[Nathan McCorkle]

Someone needs to write a good comparison of all these licenses,
because this is all really hard to follow. Some kind of venn diagram
or something where an inventor/creator could quickly /visually/
identify which license they should consider seriously.

I don't want to read through every license out there, I'm sure enough
people have done that already, but have any of them shared their
results?

--
-Nathan

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

As I mentioned before, the license stuff in the FAQ on their website explictly refers to stuff they publish on the Tekla website. As far as I can tell, this has *nothing* to do with what license you choose to attach to the instructable that you enter into their contest.

The licenses you can select on the Instructables website include:

None (All Rights Reserved)
Public Domain
Attribution
Attribution-NonCommercial
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Attribution-ShareAlike
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
Attribution-NoDerivs
General Public License
Lesser General Public License
Apache License

Patrik

[Dakota Hamill]

I don't get laywer BS jargon.  

What ever happened to morals?

What ever happened to doing the right thing?

What ever happened to being a decent human being?

What ever happened to not f$cking anyone and everyone possible over just to make a quick buck?

Wouldn't it make sense that if you create something novel, you should be given credit for it, without needing to pay tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer and patent filing fees?

If people weren't so infatuated with a race to nowhere to accumulate lots of pieces of paper with dead old people on them to use to buy lots of things made of matter they can't take with them when their journey on Earth ends, they might stop to care for other human beings.

I know this goes against the flow of all the licensing talk going on in this thread but...isn't, at the fundamental level, the goal of all people on Earth to be happy, content, and loved?  And yet, we're so great at making rules, such that a few of the people fortunate enough to be born in the right countries can exploit the suffering (knowingly or unknowingly) of other human beings to advance their own status, just a little bit.

This has nothing and everything to do with all the talk in this thread.  Because, if humans cared more for the success of the species and the whole rather than their own monetary gain, we wouldn't need licensing agreements.

But then again, that's probably why a lot of us do science, not just to get rich, but to help the whole.

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[ruphos]

While well meaning, that is an incredibly naive viewpoint and somewhat beside the point.

Yes the patent system is fucked and in dire need of an overhaul, but it was also created with the initial moral judgements you suggest. Rules are written down because while your morals are obvious to you, there is no value that is inherently true regarding property (or must things) that is not ultimately subjective. "Why can't we all just get along? " is not a valid argument.

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[Dakota Hamill]

I don't think caring about people is naive, nor do I think trying to make the world a better place through better science and freedom of information is an ignoble effort.  

"Why can't we all just get along" might be an invalid argument, but it's a pretty good question.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Dakota Hamill <dko...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think caring about people is naive,

I think ruphos summed it up well by reminding us that outlooks are subjective.

[Josiah Zayner]

I agree with Dakota. 

90% of what is "invented" is not anything new. What it comes down to is people wanting to make money off of stuff that isn't innovative. If you have something that is truly innovative it shouldn't need a patent/license because of the time and effort to reproduce what it is you have created. People have created some cool stuff on this list but worrying about a patent or license for some gel box that is just pieces of plastic glued together? 

The glowing plant project stole a patented idea, stole a picture from someone else's work and made a bunch of money off of it. So in the end what are patents really going to do even if you have them? 

Let's be honest no one's gel box is going to save the world and probably not make them any money. I talked to Lina Nilsson who runs Tekla labs and she said "I am not so much seeing all of this from an immediate DIY here and now perspective as I see it as a vehicle to have creative discussion about hardware capacity in a longterm global resource perspective." Maybe contests like this will bring awareness and start driving down the price of commercial equipment? Who knows.

Submit your stuff and win some cash money and some publicity, probably more than you would have received without the contest.

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[Cathal Garvey (Phone)]

You can't steal an idea, unless you can somehow remove it from the original creator's head. That's a linguistic construct designed to support a false economy of concept ownership, the capitalisation of human creativity.

I suggest avoiding its usage in favour of more realistic "sins"; you *can* steal credit, for example, by depriving an inventor of acknowledgement or claiming an idea has no heritage prior to you (which is almost *always* a lie or at best a lack of introspection).

The only way to steal an idea is to forbid others from using it without your permission. This is known as patenting.

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[SC]

Sometimes I work for free, sometimes I expect to be paid.  I always make sure to be clear about my requirements before I work for someone.  That's the nature of licensing, too.

 

There's nothing wrong with having rules, getting paid, and spelling it all out so everyone's clear.  Because many people have the same sets of rules, there are standard licenses we can refer to.

 

Dakota, do you work for free all the time, or are you "infatuated with pictures of dead old people"?

 

 

 

 

[John Griessen]

On 09/06/2013 07:36 AM, Josiah Zayner wrote:
> Submit your stuff and win some cash money and some publicity, probably more than you would have received without the contest.

Oh, a kickstarter for a well planned one might do better by far...
And that goes for Sebastien's OD600 meter for $25, if it has a few nice features
and looks like it is worth $25 and not going to quit in weather changes and time.

Some of us worry about the licensing because that's the way of the manufacturing world
and we want to make a difference by freely outflowing good product at low prices
without attracting lawyer letters to desist and to pay royalties.

[Sebastian Cocioba]

While still kind of on topic, what would you guys like to see in a
turbidity spec?

So far my plan is as follows:

3D printed chassis
takes standard 12.5mm cuvettes (10mm path)
~3" tall 2" wide square footprint with lid
Tiny LCD screen and two buttons as stand alone unit for blanking and
reading
The whole device is an arduino Sheild with open source standard curve
tools, simple GUI, logging, etc.

I was thinking of using a digi stump but it would drive cost up. The
original plan was a stand alone battery powered module that can be
placed anywhere and pocketed when needed.

All software open source as well as design CAD, STL, OBJ, Eagle for
sheild circuit, and parts list.

I'm debating whether or not to include a built in generic arduino or
keep it a sheild.

The arduino's main clock is precise enough for 1Hz readings but I would
be happier designing a op-amp clock a la 555 or edge counter chip for
improved accuracy and precision. With some low level arduino code I
managed to get the interrupts to work and the signal is fairly stable.
Best readings are made by blanking for each sample. The code will be in
Mono. Hope no one minds too much about that.

Other fancy things like blue tooth and larger sample areas for readings
while in the shaker incubator or SD card for CSV output will obviously
drive up costs. I'm not looking nor intending or a silly profit margin
so version 1 will be base line needs and a robust GUI. Thoughts?

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC

Plant Biotech R&D From: John Griessen
Sent: 9/6/2013 4:22 PM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] DIY Science Equipment contest

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[Mike Kang]

Hey everyone!

I'm Mike, and one of the two people who are currently running the show at Tekla Labs. I got forwarded this conversation from Javier and thought I might help clear up some confusion! 

So who the hell are we? As Patrik mentioned above, we're just a bunch of PhD students at UC Berkeley trying to do something good in our free time (If any of you are local feel free to ask to meet up, we've already had a great meeting with Counter Culture Labs here in the area). A bunch of us are tinkerers as well, and that's really how the idea started up. Basically, we want to make incentives for makers to make damn good science equipment, that can be built and used by people without the money to buy them. That being said, we don't actually want to own the designs or the equipment - we just want them to publicly exist.

We don't want your IP. Your IP is great, but it belongs to the person who made it, and we have absolutely no desire to monetize it, take it, steal it, do big business words to it, etc re: anything that you make. We just want it to be available for people who need it to be able to use it. We're kind of like a DIY Lab phonebook. All the money we spend and receive is in the form of donations or prizes - sponsors include Autodesk, 123D, BigIdeas@Berkeley, etc. There's actually a lot of foundations or organizations that just give away money to do philanthropic things. We will never charge money for access to the designs we'll host, because 1.) The designs don't belong to us and 2.) That's entirely against the point of what we do. 

This is actually kind of a nice setup for us, because we're spending other people's money to do what we do :D 

As far as Instructables goes, and the boilerplate terms of service, be careful. If you have plans to patent your design, DON'T SUBMIT THEM. Not because of any kind of scheming on their part, but because of patent law. You need to have a patent application in the pipeline before making any kind of design public in any kind of format, though I believe there is a short 1yr grace period during which you can still patent after publication. Neither Instructables nor Tekla Labs wants the IP to your designs, both of us exclusively run a hosting/access service. 

Now, regarding the questions about BY-SA previously:

We'd actually welcome some feedback from you on this issue. We picked the Creative Commons 3 license because we thought it would afford protection to the people who submit designs without hampering their freedom to go forward with it independently. An ideal scenario for the license we're looking for is: 

1.) Creator submits design to Tekla Labs, and is forever free to monetize, improve, and patent their design at will (though if removed from the website we can't guarantee it's removed from the internet entirely of course)

2.) People who see the design and find it interesting can post it elsewhere, so long as they attribute back to the creator and to Tekla, they can use it for non-commercial purposes (aka research), so long as they credit the creator and Tekla, and finally, they can improve upon and modify the design, so long as they still use their changes for non-commercial purposes only and credit the creator and Tekla. 

3.) The creator can extend the freedom to commercialize a design to whomever they desire; that is, if someone has a really cool modification or attachment to your design and you want to let them patent it so that you both can sell it together, that should be within your rights.

Basically what we want is protection for the creators while also giving them freedom to benefit from their work. We thought the creative commons 3 license filled those requirements nicely, but if you guys know of a better one that you would prefer that we use please let me know! 

In Summary (tl;dr):

- Tekla wants to show off your stuff but doesn't want to own your stuff

- Tekla wants to reward people for tinkering together stuff that does some good in the world. Neat things are cool too, but we're specifically out there to encourage people to do good things.

- Instructables just wants to cover their ass. If they take your IP, they're responsible for it, which can be lots of legal tangle. Better to just say "you do what you want with it, and don't blame us for anything that goes wrong." The clause in their legalese is a warning about the way that patent law is structured, and that publishing a design can make patenting difficult or impossible.

- Our license was picked to try to maximize the freedom of the creator while also offering them some protection since they'll be putting their stuff on a public stage. Better license suggestions are welcome.

- WE DON'T WANT OWNERSHIP OF ANYTHING. Ownership must stay with its rightful owner.

If any of you have any more questions, concerns, worries, or need clarification on anything please go ahead and send me an email! We're really just a rag-tag group of students with optimistic ideas who like to make stuff and like people that make stuff too.

Best!

- Mike

[John Griessen]

On 09/06/2013 03:53 PM, Sebastian Cocioba wrote:
> While still kind of on topic, what would you guys like to see in a
> turbidity spec?
>
> So far my plan is as follows:
>
> 3D printed chassis
> takes standard 12.5mm cuvettes (10mm path)
> ~3" tall 2" wide square footprint with lid

Small size is good. Lugs in some of the sides to use self tapping screws would be nice for integration.

> Tiny LCD screen and two buttons as stand alone unit for blanking and
> reading

Not sure what above means. Is it in two parts? knobs are great for adjusting a calibration -- button presses
can seem very slow. Are you planning cal as stand alone with least squares fit in microcontroller code,
or as a connected to a PC function?

> The whole device is an arduino Sheild with open source standard curve
> tools, simple GUI, logging, etc.

Logging via USB port or ?

>
> I was thinking of using a digi stump but it would drive cost up. The
> original plan was a stand alone battery powered module that can be
> placed anywhere and pocketed when needed.
>
> All software open source as well as design CAD, STL, OBJ, Eagle for
> sheild circuit, and parts list.

Why not KiCAD or gEDA PCB for defining the board? So the open design info
can be used with an open tool...

> I'm debating whether or not to include a built in generic arduino or
> keep it a sheild.
>
> The arduino's main clock is precise enough for 1Hz readings

Do you mean the time integrating and averaging for one reading finishes in 1 sec?

but I would
> be happier designing a op-amp clock a la 555 or edge counter chip for
> improved accuracy and precision. With some low level arduino code I
> managed to get the interrupts to work and the signal is fairly stable.

> Best readings are made by blanking for each sample.

Does that mean shuttering the optical path for calibrating zero for each measurement?
Seems unnecessary with some good use of A2D volt references and a good use of
microcontroller clocks at a MHz speed, and a cal once before a
series of measurements. There are MSP430 microcntrollers that sip on
battery power for years between batteries and have easy to use clocks and
timers for apps and for sleeping when not needed.

The code will be in
> Mono. Hope no one minds too much about that.

Sounds fine for your connected apps. For microcntroller code, C would be best.

John Griessen

[Cathal Garvey]

So, with respect to licensing, the submitter can choose whether
CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-SA-NC? Can they omit CC-BY if they just want the "SA"
part to preserve the commons? (Come to think of it, is there a BY-less
SA CC?)

Acronym soup!

On Fri, 6 Sep 2013 14:24:17 -0700 (PDT)
Mike Kang <tage...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey everyone!
>
> I'm Mike, and one of the two people who are currently running the
> show at Tekla Labs. I got forwarded this conversation from Javier and
> thought I might help clear up some confusion!
>
> So who the hell are we? As Patrik mentioned above, we're just a bunch
> of PhD students at UC Berkeley trying to do something good in our
> free time (If any of you are local feel free to ask to meet up, we've
> already had a great meeting with Counter Culture Labs here in the
> area). A bunch of us are tinkerers as well, and that's really how the

> idea started up. *Basically, we want to make incentives for makers to

> make damn good science equipment, that can be built and used by

> people without the money to buy them. *That being said, we don't

> actually want to own the designs or the equipment - we just want them

> to *publicly exist*. *
> *
> *We don't want your IP*. Your IP is great, but it belongs to the

> person who made it, and we have absolutely no desire to monetize it,
> take it, steal it, do big business words to it, etc re: anything that
> you make. We just want it to be available for people who need it to

> be able to use it. We're kind of like a DIY Lab phonebook. *All the

> money we spend and receive is in the form of donations or prizes -

> sponsors include Autodesk, 123D, BigIdeas@Berkeley, etc*. There's

> actually a lot of foundations or organizations that just give away

> money to do philanthropic things. We will *never* charge money for
> access to the designs we'll host, because *1.) The designs don't
> belong to us *and *2.) That's entirely against the point of what we
> do*.

>
> This is actually kind of a nice setup for us, because we're spending
> other people's money to do what we do :D
>
> As far as Instructables goes, and the boilerplate terms of service,

> *be careful. *If you have plans to patent your design, DON'T SUBMIT

> THEM. Not because of any kind of scheming on their part, but because
> of patent law. You need to have a patent application in the pipeline
> before making any kind of design public in any kind of format, though
> I believe there is a short 1yr grace period during which you can
> still patent after publication. Neither Instructables nor Tekla Labs
> wants the IP to your designs, both of us exclusively run a
> hosting/access service.
>

> *Now, regarding the questions about BY-SA previously:*
> *
> *

> *In Summary (tl;dr):*

> - Tekla wants to show off your stuff but doesn't want to own your
> stuff
> - Tekla wants to reward people for tinkering together stuff that does
> some good in the world. Neat things are cool too, but we're
> specifically out there to encourage people to do good things.
> - Instructables just wants to cover their ass. If they take your IP,
> they're responsible for it, which can be lots of legal tangle. Better
> to just say "you do what you want with it, and don't blame us for
> anything that goes wrong." The clause in their legalese is a warning
> about the way that patent law is structured, and that publishing a
> design can make patenting difficult or impossible.
> - Our license was picked to try to maximize the freedom of the
> creator while also offering them some protection since they'll be
> putting their stuff on a public stage. Better license suggestions are
> welcome.

> - WE DON'T WANT OWNERSHIP OF ANYTHING. Ownership *must stay with its
> rightful owner*.

[Mike Kang]

Cathal: I'm going to quickly summarize the different variants of the Creative Commons License, just to make sure everyone following this conversation is on the same page before answering that :D (I'm sorry to say this involves more bolded text)

The Creative Commons License (AKA: "cc")

The Creative Commons License is designed to be a readable and simple way of getting around legalese to distribute creative works in a way that protects your rights as a creator but also allows people to derive from and innovate upon your designs. Creative Commons Licenses are a made with a combination of codes: by, sa, nc, nd. Respectively:

by: Attribution. Things that innovate or use/copy your creative design (your "copyright" in legalese) MUST say that they got the original design from you and that it was made by you. In the scope of the competition, it also means they have to say "we found it on Instructables."

sa: Share-alike. People who innovate upon and use/copy your creative design (copyright) CANNOT publish it or claim copyright over it, UNLESS they use the same license that you use now. Meaning, someone can take your design, improve upon it or modify it, and then sell it -- and then someone else can take that design, modify it, and sell it. This one is something computer people might be familiar with, "copyleft" is an integral part of free software distribution.

The BY and SA tags apply to free software/intellectual property, while the following two tags (nc and nd) refer only to designs or publications that are not free to begin with. These two aren't applicable for BuildMyLab and Tekla Labs, but I'm including them for the sake of completeness.

nc: Non-Commercial. Derivative works and people who use/copy your copyright (creative design) can only use it to make non-commercial products - they're not allowed to turn a profit from your work. 

nd: No derivative works. People can copy and show off your work verbatim, but cannot innovate or work on it further. It's a license that turns the design into a closed source program, so to speak.

A little simple math tells us that there's 2^4, or 16 possible combination of tags. Of them, 5 are illegitimate: 4 are the ones where sa and nd are both present ("Share-alike" and "No derivatives"), which are obviously contradictory - you can't publish derivative works under the identical license ("share-alike") if the license prohibits derivative works ("no derivatives"). The 5th one is the trivial solution with no tags at all, which is pointless. Of the remaining eleven, only six are commonly used - the 5 that are not used are the ones that omit the "by" tag. While omitting the by tag is legal, it is very very rare, because it confounds the process of intellectual development. This should answer your question, Cathal! Tekla Labs and Instructables both do not use any of the combinations that omit the by tag, because of the above stated reasons. Not to mention, it's not that hard to say "I picked this up at Instructables from Cathal's design," so I don't think it strings up openness at all. 

The remaining six CC licenses that are used are:

[Mike Kang]

Whoops! Accidentally posted before I was ready, but I'll just continue where I left off:

"BY": Attribution
"BY-NC": Attribution-NonCommercial
"BY-NC-SA": Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
"BY-SA": Attribution-ShareAlike
"BY-NC-ND": Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
"BY-ND": Attribution-NoDerivs

You'll notice that this matches the list that Patrik posted previously of licenses that Instructables makes available (:D). The bolded license, the previously discussed CC-BY-SA, is the one used most commonly by Instructables (though you can choose differently) and currently by Tekla Labs (though we're open to changing our license format if it seems compelling to do otherwise, but we'd like to match the Instructables format because it affects the designs we can publish on our site).

In sum, the CC-BY-SA license is the license most commonly used by Instructables and employed currently by Tekla Labs. It states that your design is yours, and belongs to you, but also that people can copy, use, distribute, display, and create derivatives of your work. If they do any of those verbs, they must 1.) say they got the original from you, Instructables, and Tekla Labs, and 2.) any derivative they publish must also adhere to this same license. tl;dr, someone who makes a derivative of your work has to copy-paste your license as their license. 

Whew! That was a bit of a mouthful. Now, as applicable to the current competition and Tekla. As Patrik posted earlier, the Instructables licenses available are:

None (All Rights Reserved): The most evil of licenses, which says Instructables can show your design, but people can't do anything with it except use it for personal use. Tekla can't post it on our website if you choose this, as well, so we're extra sad :(
Public Domain: Forfeiture of intellectual property, this severs your ties to the project and lets anyone use it to do anything they want, except patent it and claim it for their own. It also forfeits YOUR right to patent and call it your own as well.

Attribution
Attribution-NonCommercial
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Attribution-ShareAlike
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
Attribution-NoDerivs

General Public License: This one's very similar to the CC-BY-SA license that we currently use. The only real difference, so far as I am aware, is the fact that this thing is a little harder to read and is generally used by free software distributors. If you like this one, I recommend using the CC-BY-SA license, because it saves us a lot of trouble that, to be honest, we'd probably just deal with by leaving your design on Instructables only and not putting it on our website :P
Lesser General Public License: I'll be honest the difference between this and the regular GPL is not entirely clear to me, but it seems to be analogous to something like... CC-BY-.5SA; aka, it removes some restrictions on people who can make derivatives and publish it so that they don't necessarily have to use the same license (important if you have a bit of software that'd be good in a library that is then incorporated into a larger program, which is sold under a commercial license). Again, this is a software thing and I really encourage using CC because reading these stupid things is really hard and confusing.
Apache License: This is just the computer software version of the CC-BY license. The LGPL can be viewed as a middle ground between the GPL and the Apache license. Notice that all of these things are "free" but they're for different definitions of freedom. Apache says "free to do whatever the hell you want, including limiting derivative's privileges" and GPL says "free to do whatever you want so long as you DON'T inhibit the privileges of the derivative works." 

Richard Stallman is kind of insane, because after looking at this for like an hour I can feel my brains melting and I can't imagine doing this for a living.

Currently, you can publish to Instructables under any license you like. However, Tekla cannot currently publish it on our website if you choose anything other than CC-BY-SA, because we need the license versions to match; we don't have the infrastructure yet to accommodate different licenses. Feel free to submit for the prize under any of those other ones though!!

Hope that helps. I need to go let my keyboard cool down, but feel free to continue with questions!

[John Griessen]

On 09/09/2013 04:51 AM, Cathal Garvey wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Sep 2013 14:24:17 -0700 (PDT) Mike Kang wrote:
> *Now, regarding the questions about BY-SA previously:*
>>*
>>*
>>We'd actually welcome some feedback from you on this issue. We picked
>>the Creative Commons 3 license because we thought it would afford
>>protection to the people who submit designs without hampering their
>>freedom to go forward with it independently. An ideal scenario for
>>the license we're looking for is:
>>1.) Creator submits design to Tekla Labs, and is forever free to
>>monetize, improve, and patent their design at will (though if removed
>>from the website we can't guarantee it's removed from the internet
>>entirely of course)
>>2.) People who see the design and find it interesting can post it
>>elsewhere, so long as they attribute back to the creator and to
>>Tekla, they can use it for non-commercial purposes (aka research), so
>>long as they credit the creator and Tekla, and finally, they can
>>improve upon and modify the design, so long as they still use their
>>changes for non-commercial purposes only and credit the creator and
>>Tekla.

2. limits uptake by people developing variants of an open design.
Derivative developers need to ask for a license from the creator(s)
and that gets more difficult as the lineage grows. Dang if I know the best way
to do this, but for most purposes, I like the TAPR license, which
asks derivative developers to attribute and contact original developer
with updates in any form, which includes all known in the license chain,
but has no detailed structure, just "send documents to email". TAPR
licenses any use of the design data -- commercial. TAPR has
a no patent exercise clause for all the developers in the chain -- they
promise not to sue each other. There are no mentions in TAPR of how one publishes
info and no required structure, so it is easy to see doing by prospective users.

Right now, the number of users of open hardware licenses on the planet seems tiny,
but growing. The non-commercial part seems stifling for engineer/manufacturers
to make a little profit from their effort removing flaws and kinks from
a good concept. The profit might only last as long as it takes to make another
improved derivative, so requiring to get approval from all in the license
chain before you is a slow down and could be a stopper.

3.) The creator can extend the freedom to commercialize a
>>design to whomever they desire; that is, if someone has a really cool
>>modification or attachment to your design and you want to let them
>>patent it so that you both can sell it together, that should be
>>within your rights.

So far in the open hardware evolution, the successes keep it simple, like
making breakout boards that chip companies will not do, and for less money.
So, the idea of patenting something great is not in their minds usually --
they are focusing on niche market needs and hoping to never go to court
or hire patent attorneys. They do want to make their fixed expenses
and not have to also work at something else to survive though.
Believe it or don't, but the kind of design work needed to make
seemingly *magic* improvements in bio lab gear price/performance
ratio is mundane for engineers. Boring for scientists. Trivial
conceptually. Hobbyists can even do some of it. To do it well
takes time and that requires rent money, so NC is a drag on it.

I suggest that your desire to leave the patent avenue open is fine
and it always is going to be. Believing that anyone but a hobbyist could
go ahead with a non-commercial license seems optimistic to me.

I prefer letting it, (the design data), go. Let it be open as in free,
with a few emails required only. Once something gets into the money
spending range of patents, it must be more main stream, not a niche,
and not DIY related. Once you start spending a river of money on
attorneys, you're pretty much going down the Wall Street investor
path and can't do things very inexpensively, only quick and shiny, (or dead).

Someone doing a patent would probably not
ask for a license, and when they needed to defend their monopoly
turf, they would probably battle against the chain of cross licensed
creators before them by the usual methods of making something
similar, but branded with some industrial design and say the
concept part was "obvious to the trade". Patenting is about battle,
so I doubt much selling collaboration would happen between open hardware
developers and patent seekers/holders.

John Griessen

but if
>>you guys know of a better one that you would prefer that we use
>>please let me know!

TAPR please.
or CERN, maybe -- it's evolved since I read it last

[Mike Kang]

John: Excellent point. I actually misspoke in my first email, and I'm sorry for any confusion that might have spawned. The CC-BY-SA license DOES allow for-profit licensing (by both the creator and the derivatives). It only stipulates that any for-profit licensed derivatives must also allow for-profit licensed derivatives. It also does not require written approval from the creator in order to use it, so there's no email chain to crawl up either. As far as I know, any sort of derivative can be made and published so long as it's under the CC-BY-SA license and with proper attribution, but there's no need to email the creator and alert them about your efforts so long as the attribution is there. 

Hope that helps! I'll look into TAPR and CERN though, a little wary of using lesser-known platforms but if it fits best we'll definitely consider it! 

Cheers,

- Mike

[John Griessen]

On 09/09/2013 01:39 PM, Mike Kang wrote:
> there's no email chain to crawl up either.

TAPR simply demands licensees send an email. They don't have to confirm it by a two way conversation.
Apart from attribution, the emails and the no-patent-suits between licensees are the
two big differences from CC-BY-SA. The intent is to build community and help collaboration on improvement.

Glad to hear about you all at Tekla Labs wanting proliferation of ideas and practical machines DIY or otherwise.

John Griessen

[Mackenzie Cowell]

Does the CC-BY-SA license discussed here only cover the design or the actual hardware and its sale? 

What legal precedents show a CC-BY-SA licensor stopping an off-license manufacturer from selling the product of the design? I think Phil Torrone had some insightful thoughts on this a while ago re: a 3D printer clone product on kickstarter. The bottom line was that currently there is no legal power behind the copyright-based licenses but there is social power behind them.

My philosophy is, just do it, and be good, and the rest will follow. Relax about the pseudo-legal murkiness of the CC-style licenses for HW and just make stuff.

Mac

[Todd Duncombe]

Reminder Tekla Labs BuildMyLab Contest ends in 5 days! (on 11:59 pm PT, December 16th 2013)

http://www.instructables.com/contest/buildmylab

There are already a number of great submissions. Even if you are not submitting I encourage everyone to check it out.

-Todd

PS as an unrealed note, Tekla Labs is also cohosting a hackathon - "Hacking for Global Health" at UC Berkeley on January 11th incase anyone is interested! http://www.eventbrite.com/e/diagnostics-by-design-a-hack-day-for-global-health-tickets-8959705721?aff=es2&rank=1&sid=1f2927a15d2911e3887412313b0a99d4