As you might have read a recent post of mine, I’ve recently been getting acquiented with the Arduino platform. Indeed I got my hands on my very own Arduino Nano this afternoon when it arrived in the mail.
Now, quite handily, Wired has an interesting article on Arduino and Open Source Computing (titled ‘Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?‘).
Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.
The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.