Yeah to clarify, I’m talking almost exclusively from the pre-git days. That whole monome-community repo was created by manually dumping all of the stuff on the wiki into it to save the hassle of making a separate repo for hundreds of patchers.
I paid zero regard to the licenses any authors had attached to their works, as almost none explicitly did (ie. technically retaining full copyright). Obviously we can assume something from their public posting of the patches, but it’s not as clear cut as using the license currently attached to the patches.
Seems to me this is mostly an academic consideration anyway though. Traditionally the monome position is something like:
- If you plan on freely sharing or taking some nominal fee, go for it with proper attribution.
- If you plan on making a business out of something, contact the author before going ahead.
I’d say that’s broadly the mentality that most existing content was created within, so probably a good framework to keep in mind if no explicit license is mentioned.
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I realize this is probably a bit off topic now. Just trying to reflect on the origins of much of the shared material.
Some open-source fanatics (particularly from the software realm) had issues with the use of non-commercial license (“not TRUE open source!”) which created issues in the hardware realm. This ‘contact for commercial use’ isn’t to discourage commercial use, but simply to maintain legal rights to stop carbon copies undercutting the hardware. In theory.
All said, I don’t remember what license monome used on the early hardware, but this is just some food for thought, or perhaps just a reflection in hindsight.
