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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

CERN uses the following licences for most Open Hardware designs:

Hardware

Software

Gateware

  • GNU Lesser General Public License - GNU LGPL for Gateware, i.e. HDL designs whose purpose is to end up as FPGA bistreams or ASICs (VHDL, Verilog, ...)
    • Example of use in an OHR project
    • Note: we think that there is curently no perfect copyleft license for gateware. We are trying to contribute to remedy that situation. See Document. In the meantime we are using LGPL as many other people do, including many projects in opencores.org. We are also, for some cases where we need to be more formal, temporarily switched to the Solderpad 2.0 license (a permissive, i.e. non-copyleft license) while we work on CERN OHL v2, which should provide a reliable licensing solution for projects which need either strong or weak copyleft.

Manuals, images and logos

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

23 July 2019