[ANNOUNCE] Neo1973 DebugBoard v2 Schematics released

[Harald Welte]

Hi!

Today I can proudly announce that we finally were able to take a step
that has long been anticipated:  The public release of the schematics
for our Debug Board v2.

You can find the schematics at
http://people.openmoko.org/laforge/doc/hardware/neo1973_debug_board/neo1973_debugboard_v2_schematics.pdf
and they're also linked from the apropriate wiki page.

I'd like to use this opportunity to thank Joern Kaipf for his original
work on OOCDlink, which has inspired us to build something similar, but
adding a FPC connector for our Neo1973 device models, plus a bus-powered
USB hub.

Even though OOCDlink does not come with some copyleft-style license, we
strongly believe that it is good practise to publish those schematics
anyway.  And here they finally go.

So why are the schematics under cc-by-sa?  Because I personally still
don't know of any proper copyleft-style license for hardware.  Software
licenses really are not applicable. Where is your source code, the
object code, what is linking, etc.  Tons of questiosn that have to be
interpreted by legal people with fairly limited predictability.

So looking at the schematics as some work of art (like CC licenses do)
is also not entirely applicable, but probably a bit closer match.  There
is no source/object code distinction, we release the schematics
basically as digital image (not as netlist or anythign parseable), ...

For technical discussion, please follow-up to the neo1973-hardware list
and don't Cc community.  

For discussion about the general aspects of releasing schematics and
licensing issues, please follow-up to community and don't Cc
neo1973-hardware.

Oh, and yes, as soon as we start shipping DebugBoard v3, we will release
those schematics without any further delay.

Happy hacking,
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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