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### Q: What does CERN OHL v2 try to achieve?
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A: The CERN Open Hardware Licence aims at providing a solid legal basis
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for the sharing of hardware designs.
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for the sharing of hardware designs. In version 2, we intend to give
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Licensors different options for the sharing mechanism: strongly
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reciprocal, weakly reciprocal and permissive.
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### Q: What is the scope of CERN OHL v2?
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A: The licence is meant to cover Open Source Hardware (OSHW) designs. It
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has no concern with proprietary developments.
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### Q: What are the rights the licence rests upon?
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A: The licence text makes no assumptions about the rights that will be
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invoked to sustain it. These may include but are not limited to
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copyright, patents, design rights, and database rights.
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### Q: Why is CERN doing this?
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A: One of the most important parts of CERN's mandate is knowledge
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dissemination. OSHW is a natural way to disseminate hardware designs
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done at CERN to the rest of society. It is also important that a licence
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such as CERN OHL is stewarded by an institution whose mandate and values
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can guarantee its stability over
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time.
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## Questions about reciprocal hardware licensing
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### Q: Copyright does not cover hardware. How do you implement strongly reciprocal licensing in CERN OHL v2?
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A: Roughly speaking, the hardware equivalent of a binary object in the
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free and open-source software world would be a tangible object made
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thanks to design files licensed under an OSHW licence. So implementing a
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reciprocal licence involves solving the challenge of ensuring that the
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recipient of a piece of hardware gets access to the original design
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files. CERN OHL v2 provides two mechanisms to ensure that:
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- The licence explicitly asks to provide an easy way
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- two
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