> They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus.
Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.
Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.
You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use, the tinkerers have the plans so they can modify the hardware.
Then the commercial suppliers of replacement parts can pay a small percentage of their sales to the group that made the original designs, so they can continue to build new designs and improve existing ones.
Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.
> Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.
I don't think it's specific to hardware, but yes, I personally think this is a poor choice of license. There are actual Open Source licenses designed for hardware, but this isn't it.
> Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.
Dual-licensing would be nice, but still isn't Open Source and is still awkward; if the original folks are gone, there's nobody to grant those commercial licenses. If you really must, I think the best option is a BSL-style arrangement where you release it under a restrictive license up front but it automatically becomes truly Open Source, including allowing commercialization, after a year or two.
> You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use,
Point of order : GPL is absolutely not a NC license. You are free to make money off of GPL software, you just have to give code to anyone who gets binaries (possibly only if they ask, again this is general terms not legal advice).
> Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.
I'm kind of okay with that. Carbon copying and selling the design is giving something to the community: availability. I'm 100% on board with share-alike licenses, of course; anyone else selling it also being forced to share the source would be great. But a lot of my point is that as someone who wants open source printers to take over, I absolutely want these things to be ubiquitous, including by them being sold for pennies on the dollar by fly-by-night manufacturers and cloned and remixed and modified by companies that stand to make a fortune by doing so.
> They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus.
Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.
Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.
You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use, the tinkerers have the plans so they can modify the hardware.
Then the commercial suppliers of replacement parts can pay a small percentage of their sales to the group that made the original designs, so they can continue to build new designs and improve existing ones.
Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.