We are an organization named Open Hardware^[1] We exist to support, assist, and promote an idea called Open Hardware^[2]. That idea is the creation and distribution of physical or electronic designs that are under licenses that meet all three of the requirements of:

• The Open Hardware Definition 1.1
• The Open Source Definition (As applied to hardware rather than software. The Open Hardware Definition is essentially a hardware translation of this document.)
• The Four Freedoms of the Free Software Foundation. (As applied to hardware rather than software). ^[3]

Why all three? The three documents insist on the same set of rights. By incorporating all three, we will be able to say, emphatically, that Open Hardware is Open Source and Free Software.^[4]

There is an existing organization that covers a broader spectrum of sharing that does not demand the full set of the rights that we specify: it is called Creative Commons, and all of the world's non-commercial or no-modification-allowed designs fit well in that tent. Theirs is a worthy mission, it's just not our mission.

We assert that we are not the official representative organization of Open Hardware Developers. Instead, our purpose is to assist our community. Because the Open Hardware Developers are an amorphous community, no organization can legitimately represent them. An organization that took on the conceit of representing that community would do them harm. We oppose and will work against any such organization.

Mission Statement

We set ourselves these missions:

• To promote the idea of Open Hardware and to educate people about it.
• To assist the Open Hardware Developers by providing a license program. This program will
  • Educate developers about the process of applying licenses to their work.
  • Provide a minimal list of recommended licenses, which are all compatible with each other to make the license selection process easier for developers and to avoid problems of license incompatibility. See Recommended License List Process.
  • Provide a list of certified licenses that is kept small but not minimal, which we assert each provide the rights of Open Hardware, are the product of competent attorneys, and do not duplicate other approved licenses in both effect and jurisdiction. See Certified Open Hardware License Approval Process.
• To assist the community in other necessary ways as the time demands.

Organizational Relationships

We wish to cause no "Free" vs. "Open" argument with our choice of name, and assert that we value Freedom as fundamental to Open Hardware. We explicitly state our support of the Free Software Foundation and its effort to promote the Four Freedoms.

References

1. ↑ You can call us "the Open Hardware organization" if you wish, to disambiguate the organization from the idea. We chose to stay simple and not add "foundation" or "initiative" to our name. We don't criticize other organizations that use those words, but they sound a bit grandiose when applied to us. The phrase "dot org" refers to our web site, not us.
2. ↑ Why do we call it Open Hardware? Shouldn't we call it Open Source Hardware, Free Hardware, Libre Hardware, etc.? We have a historical precedent in that Free Software is applied to a subset of gratis software and that Open Source is applied to a subset of software with available source code. We remember that Free Software and Open Source received exactly the same criticism that their names should be longer and more specific. We are choosing Open Hardware as the most easily remembered term, with the knowledge that the sucessful campaigns that precede us: Free Software and Open Source, used the simplest term possible. We register esthetic revulsion at "Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)" as a compromise. And we first registered the OpenHardware.org domain in 1999.
3. ↑ We accept those three documents as they exist as of 1 August 2011. Although we include the main author of the first two documents, the documents are not in our control and we do not wish to have our mission complicated by parties that wish to change the documents.
4. ↑ A mistake was made in the early days of the Open Source Initiative, and it worked at cross purposes with the Free Software Foundation. By including all three rights statements, we avoid that mistake. We can say this qualifies as "Creative Commons" too, but Creative Commons only insists on two fundamental rights across their combination of licenses: the right to read, and the right to copy non-commercially.