Thingiverse Adds Open Source Hardware Licenses – Here’s Why Engineers Wanted It
A quiet expansion of licensing options on Thingiverse caught our eye recently, revealing one of the first moves to reposition the site as a space for engineers to post, collaborate on, and eventually even manufacture and monetize their projects.
It’s been a hot minute since the folks at MyMiniFactory took over Thingiverse, and while that announcement led with strong ideology against AI-generated content and generated a lot of attention, a recent, quiet update to the platform gives an indication of the kind of place it aspires to and the type of user the new owners intend to attract.
Posting to the site’s new forum, Thingiverse CEO Romain Kidd explains the expansion of the default license types available to Thingiverse users when they upload a new “thing” to the site, with CERN Open Hardware License v2 joining the list.
The move isn’t a significant, material change to the platform, but it does make it a more welcoming option for particular designers. The need for these license types was put forward by engineers using the site, Kidd explains in the post, declaring the move “a first step towards building a trusted platform for open source hardware communities.”
That’s pretty ambitious for a platform that, not long ago, was seen as an aging STL repository rapidly losing ground to MakerWorld and Printables.
Asked about the move, Kidd told All3DP that the Thingiverse team “see that our role as a platform is to build the tools and services to allow open-source hardware communities to go from an idea, to validating this idea, to finding people to work with, to funding, to collaboration tools, to hosting open source hardware projects, all the way to the manufacturing of these projects.”
Following the acquisition, a lot of talking and, crucially, listening has taken place. “This is a (re-)focus on what Thingiverse truly represents for a lot of people who have been with Thingiverse since up to 2008. We felt this deeply during the AMA and during the conversations with members.”
“An engineer, Ella Fox, a member of the Voron Design Community [and builder of the ingenious April Fool’s prank-turned-real Prusawire printer conversion], got in touch and wanted to share Voron mods, but was unhappy with the approach to licensing on other platforms and wanted the CERN OHL v2 to be supported on Thingiverse.”
This is an important distinction. While researching for this article, I was surprised to learn that across the various popular model repositories, most offer the gamut of creative commons licenses, plus restrictive house licenses. We could find only two offering such hardware-specific licenses: Cults, which offers a single, older version of CERN-OHL, and Printables, which has Prusa’s new OCL license.
Kidd continues: “We just listened, agreed that it made sense for open source hardware projects and added the CERN OHL. It’s straightforward. If that’s what a project owner wants and is aligned with our vision, we do it.”
CERN OHL v2 comes in three flavors: CERN OHL S, which is strongly reciprocal; CERN OHL W, weakly reciprocal; and CERN OHL P, permissive. Together, they give you flexibility in how strictly you share your work with others while allowing them to build on and incorporate it into their work.
For designers: What choosing CERN OHL signals
If you’re a designer uploading to the site, this license type is appropriate for you to disseminate your work as far and as usefully as possible – into real products, with real improvements through real collaboration. Using CERN OHL for your designs could be considered a meaningful signal to anyone considering building on them – including that you’ve explicitly waived the right to use your own patents against anyone doing so in good faith. This patent grant matters more for commercial entities building on open source work, but only exists between the parties of the license.
The license’s documentation requirements provide stronger, better structured prior art, which could prove helpful if you find yourself in the expensive position of attempting to invalidate a patent claim against you, but chiefly it just makes designs easier to work with. Share-alike conditions pushing improvements back into the commons makes the work compound: every derivative makes the original more valuable.
Thingiverse doesn’t currently guide users on what documentation to upload for a CERN OHL design, nor which specific license suits their intentions. But we’re told this is being actively worked on.
For non-designers: What does the license mean for me?
If you’re the type to browse Thingiverse for things to print, satisfying personal hobbies and interests and generally putting your 3D printing to productive, personal use, then these licenses are of little consequence or relevance to you. They are for users who are inventing and building things, turning to others’ designs as a matter of convenience and standardization. Understanding where the limits of your use of a design ends is where you need to be careful.
That’s the kicker for these license types. Personal, private usage is ostensibly fine and the unwritten law of the land (in some cases it technically isn’t, but that’s an article for another day). But if what you do with the designs or parts produced and licensed by others, is subsequently shared in some way (in other words, distributed) then the license terms kick in and you should adhere to them.
Born in a particle lab: What is CERN OHL v2?
In short, the CERN open hardware license originates from the particle physics lab of the same name (they of the Large Hadron Collider fame). Engineers there identified a gap between the ease with which software could be legally shared and collaborated on, and hardware, which largely, couldn’t. Open source software and Creative Commons licenses were deemed inadequate for their purposes and intention. And so, in 2011, CERN OHL was published.
Initially used between the physicists to develop specialist equipment, it was gradually rewritten over time to strip out CERN-specific language and simplified for better global adoption, eventually resulting in its modern version, version 2, which launched in 2020.
Unlike the software- and copyright-centric licenses that are, to this day, still commonly used out of convenience in 3D printing, this open hardware license more broadly covers the fragmented nature of what it takes to actually build a thing: the myriad “source” elements like design drawings, circuit diagrams, bills of materials, and more.
Where software “source available” means the actual code that compiles into the program, in hardware it’s fuzzier, and so the source being available should condition all the documentation that make up the specific knowledge to produce that physical object.
Three licenses, different uses
There are three versions of CERN OHL v2.
CERN OHL P – acknowledge the original
You can use a CERN OHL P (pdf) licensed part as you want – as is, modified, anything, provided you attribute the original author. If you sell or distribute a product that contains their part, modified or otherwise, simply acknowledge their authorship of said part. You are not forced to share anything of your own invention, even if the OHL-P-licensed part is an integral component of the greater project.
CERN OHL W – if you improve or change it, share it
CERN OHL W (pdf) introduces more aggressive conditions. It is still permissive in the sense that use of a OHL-W within another work does not automatically mean that work itself must be open sourced in kind, but any changes, modifications, or improvements to it must be. You could use an OHL W-licensed fastener in your product, unchanged, and besides attribution, not be obligated to do anything under the license conditions. If you tweaked that fastener to suit your design, say an optimization for specific conditions or stresses it endures as a part of your larger product, the redesigned fastener must then also be shared under the OHL W (or OHL S) license. You contribute a better or specialized version back to the commons for others’ usage.
CERN OHL S – share everything it touches
CERN OHL S (pdf) is peak open source hardware licensing, applying strong copyleft to anything it is incorporated into. You can think of its as the viral license spreader. Using a CERN OHL S part in your work means all that work must be licensed in kind and documentation made transparently available to anyone using it. It would be unwise to develop a product or project using CERN OHL S-licensed parts without being all-in on subsequently releasing that product in its entirety, open source. A prominent example of a CERN OHL S project “in the wild” is the OpenFlexure microscope, an affordable lab-grade microscope that anyone can make, produce to sell, and develop further.
It was interesting (and surprising) to see MyMiniFactory take over Thingiverse, but one thing the takeover has exposed is that the site clearly still holds some cultural cachet in the space. This renewal, in lockstep with what its most dedicated users want, will be fascinating to watch play out. At the time of publication there are no uploads on Thingiverse using the new licenses – but it’s early days still. Do you agree with Thingiverse’s new direction? Is a new home for open source hardware what’s needed? Hit the comments and let us know.
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License: The text of "Thingiverse Adds Open Source Hardware Licenses – Here’s Why Engineers Wanted It" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.