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Open Hardware Repository - Introduction

The Open Hardware Repository ohwr.org is a place on the web for electronics designers at experimental physics facilities to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement.

The Manifesto on the ohr-support project wiki page explains the numerous advantages to working in a completely open environment, while on these same ohr-support wiki pages you can find how you can set up your own project. Note that all information on this site is accessible to anyone; you will not be able to access more material by registering.

The CERN Open Hardware Licence (CERN OHL) governs the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products. Other open licence types may be used for projects on the OHR site.

Open Hardware can be commercial

Commercial Non-commercial
Open Winning combination. Best of both worlds. Whole support burden falls on developers. Not scalable.
Proprietary Vendor lock-in. Dedicated non-reusable projects.

Statistics (January 2013)

There are 100 projects on ohwr:

  • 52 hardware projects
  • 39 HDL or Software projects
  • 9 other projects

There are eleven instititutes leading the different projects: CERN, Soleil, GSI, Brazillian Light Source, University of Bristol, Warsaw University of Technology, University of Zurich, University of Pavia, Rockefeller University, University of Cape Town, Heidelberg University.
And there are 16 commercial companies are involved who develop, produce and/or test open hardware products.

What CERN writes about OHR

What others write about OHR

Companies using the OHR site

In December 2012 sixteen companies from eleven countries were actively using the OHR site to develop or produce open hardware, software and drivers. These companies may be paid for the open developments. Actually in July 2014 the number is the same.

Open Hardware Repository

Licences used for CERN Open Hardware designs

For each project, there may be reasons to lean towards a permissive, weakly reciprocal or strongly reciprocal licence. These can include the wishes of collaborators, CERN guidelines and legal constraints imposed by components used in a given design. These are some informal guidelines for CERN designers wishing to release their work as Open Hardware:

Hardware

  • CERN Open Hardware Licence - CERN OHL Version 2 includes three variants: P (permissive), W (weakly reciprocal) and S (strongly reciprocal). Notice that S assumes your component libraries are also released under S or a compatible licence. For designs in which this is not the case (e.g. designs using the CERN Altium library), S cannot be used. W is then a good compromise. We recommend you use W with the "or later" suffix, i.e. license your designs as "CERN-OHL-W-2.0+" (see SPDX codes). The '+' at the end stands for "or later". It means that a licensee can take your design as being licensed under CERN-OHL-W-2.0 or any later version CERN publishes of the same W variant. This will allow your design to benefit from future improvements in the licence.

Software

Gateware

  • The CERN Open Hardware Licence v2 now works very nicely for gateware (HDL/FPGA/ASIC). Pick one of the three variants (S, W or P) depending on your preferences and constraints. W is a good compromise by default. It specifies that all improvements to your design (e.g. a core) must be shared back, but it can be used in a larger work and the licensee does not need to release the source of that larger design (beyond your code). As for the case of hardware, we recommend you use the "or later" suffix: CERN-OHL-S-2.0+, CERN-OHL-W-2.0+ or CERN-OHL-P-2.0+.

Manuals, images and logos

Copyright CERN 2019
“This document is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.”

See also: Final Report of the Open Source Software Licence Task Force that formulates recommendations on which licence should be used for software developed at CERN.

See also

Open Hardware Workshops

Other events

Articles about Open Hardware

Other Open Hardware sites

OH directories

Open Source Hardware Organizations

Open Source Meta Research Projects

27 October 2020