CERN Open Hardware License for new registered users

[Jeffrey Warren]

Hello all! The signup drive for the CERN Open Hardware License is going very well! Although we have 29% of all research notes and wiki edits licensed, that results in the near infrared camera project being 100% licensed under the OHL (hooray!!), and several others just 1 or 2 signatures short of 100%. Most tools have a large majority of agreement, and nobody has yet indicated that they *don't* agree.

With that encouraging level of support, we're moving to make the CERN OHL the default license for hardware designs for the website, so that new users are asked up front to agree to share their work under the CERN OHL. I added to/edited the following text to the user registration page (http://publiclaboratory.org/user/register):

As an open source community, we believe in open licensing of content so that other members of the community can leverage your work legally -- with attribution, of course. By joining the Public Laboratory site, you agree to release the content you post here under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license, and the hardware designs you post under the CERN Open Hardware License 1.1 (fulltext). This has the added benefit that others must share their improvements in turn with you.

This does not mean that we have to stop reaching out to *existing members* of our community who have not yet signed. Again - as always this is open to discussion, but as we've had 100% agreement from those who've filled out the form, it seems as if this is an issue of simply getting the word out rather than actually convincing people. 

If you're already registered on the site and haven't read over the agreement, you can read/sign here: http://publiclaboratory.org/wiki/open-hardware-licensing

Best,

Jeff & the web working group