Open Source Licence Management

Hey all,

I am Milenko from TU Darmstadt Space Technology, a stundent group from Darmstadt, Germany.
We are currently beginning to develop a CubeSat and a Rocketry programm which both should be made open source from the very beginning.
Before setting up the gits and so on we want to make sure that the licencing is correct.
It would be interesting to us to know how you are managing intellectual property that is produced for the Libre Space Foundation.
Which licences do you prefer for Software and for Hardware and why?
An other Question is, under which name is the Software/Hardware published?
Is it enough to set up a repository with the licence in it, write our groups name on it and anyone contributing to it is accepting it that way?

Greetings from Darmstadt,

Milenko

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Some basic stuff. The larger a project gets it is more common to use several licenses. There are many open-source licenses that a project can pick according to it’s needs and licensing can be an issue of debate (although we had consensus early on when we started). We wanted to provide our users with a license that will cover the following liberties for our users:
0 freedom to run
1 freedom to study
2 freedom to share
3 freedom to modify

We wanted a license that has a strong copyleft, meaning that if you do modify our source code and distribute it (or use it on your website for the AGPLv3 parts) you should share your modifications with the same license.

GNU GPLv3 for software. This license is a copyleft. Keep in mind that the v3 has several provisions regarding to against software patents, DRM and more. Also keep in mind that GPLv3 is recognized as a legal document in several jurisdictions.
GNU AGPLv3,for websites actually is a special version of the GPL,that covers the application layer service loophole
LGPL is a “weaker copyleft” license designed for libraries.

Hardware is licensed CERN Open Hardware Licence v1.2 which provides a strong copyleft and is in my opinion closer to the copyleft paradigm on GPL.

Hope that helped.

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Thank you very much for your reply elkos!

The internal debate is still ongoing which licences to chose but your answer helped a lot in that process.

We decided to use GNU GPLv3 for software and CERN OHL v1.2 for hardware, as you recommended it.

The git is still being set up, but you can already find it here https://github.com/TUDSaT
and our overall activity of course in social media https://twitter.com/TUDSaT

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