I’m uncertain if the GPLv3 [1], or something from Creative Commons [3], like the CC-BY-SA [2] license, would be appropriate for open source hardware. I’ve come across the CERN-OHL-S [4], which appears interesting, but I’ve never encountered it in the wild, so I’m wary of it’s apparent obscurity.
References
- Type: Webpage. Title: “GNU General Public License”. Publisher: “GNU Operating System”. Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:29Z. URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html.
- Type: Webpage. Title: “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International”. Publisher: “Creative Commons”. Accessed: 2025-09-04T21:30Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
- Type: Webpage. Title: “About CC Licenses”. Publisher: “Creative Commons”. Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:31Z. URI: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/.
- Type: Text. Title: “CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal”. Publisher: “CERN”. Accessed: 2025-04-09T21:33Z. URI: https://gitlab.com/ohwr/project/cernohl/-/wikis/uploads/819d71bea3458f71fba6cf4fb0f2de6b/cern_ohl_s_v2.txt.
You may find a better answer in the distinction between “profit” and “exploit”.
Does GPL allow a corporation to profit off your work? Yes it does.
Does it allow them to exploit your work? In my opinion, no.
Compared to something like MIT which in my opinion lets them both profit and exploit you.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer by any means, just a GPL advocate.
Imo profit without compensation is exploitation. If you are paid a salary and the owner sells your burger for more, that’s profit. If you make a burger and the owner sells it for profit without paying you anything, that’s exploitation.
As I just found out, as bizarre as it seems, the definition of OpenSource requires that your work can be exploited by large corporations.
The Lemmy users in the thread were angry with a developer because he didn’t want his program exploited by Google/Microsoft/whomever.