Assignments Goals

• Create and document a license for your final project
• Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

Week's Lectures

Choosing a License

Let's start saying that diving into licenses and "legal language" for me is a pain in the a$$. I had really a hard time trying to wrap my head around all the little but significant differences between licenses, cases, modifications and minutiae.

So I decided to prune the range of choices, and focus on licenses for free material. The ones I chose to investigate more are:

The GPLv3 is a really deep detailed license the covers several legal aspects, ranging from Tivoization, DRM infringments and discriminatory patent deals (shame on you Microsoft!).

This kind of license (from what I gathered reading the documentation and "explaination" pages) focus on the idea of free software, defined as the sum of these freedoms:

• the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
• the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
• the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
• the freedom to share the changes you make.

The Creative Commons site is really clear and explain in a more simplistic way the idea behind the different types of license. Moreover the web page offers an interactive tool to choose the most suitable license variant for your needs.

BUT reading further and trying to compare the two type of licenses I stumbled upon THIS link that lists a bunch of other licenses and explains with examples or clarifications, the compatibility with GPL.

In particular, here is stated (and on the official Creative Commons site too, HERE), that CC Licenses are meant for artistic, show (entertainment) and didactic works and they recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software, even if some variants are one-way compatible with GPL.

A nice note is found at the end of that page:
Electronic circuits are meant for practical use, hence their projects too need free license. We advise the GNU GPL v3 or subsequent; version 3 has been adapted for this use case.

So, wrapping up, the most suitable license for my final project is GPLv3, even if in my project I have not only software code, but also a lot of frame modeling and building.

Dissemination Planning

I have never really thought that my final project could be a commercial product, it started as a need for my volleyball team, and became a useful exercise to learn something new and to put in practice some of the new skills learned.

I understand that the plan to disseminate is important for growing the project. If I imagine the future of this project, I hope that other amateur volleyball teams like mine, with a little curiosity and desire to build something, will follow my project to reproduce, improve and share their results.

As part of my dissemination plan, these are the main points I have in mind at the moment:

• I intend to link all the pages of the project development on a dedicated section of my team website
  [Joy Project Volley].


• I intend to share everything I designed, with all the circuit schematics, firmware and app source code on GitHub (or similar) so that everyone can contribute to the project, fix bugs, add functionalities etc.


• I understand that maybe just looking at the photos and reading my (poor) english documentation, it could be not so straightforward to get exactly the procedure to build my electronic scoreboard from scratch, so if I will have time in the future, it could be nice to create a video tutorial with detailed instruction of build and assembly of the parts, and share it on the major Social Media platforms.

Assignments Outcomes

• Recognise the range of licenses available
• Formulate future opportunities

Have you:

summarised two kinds of licences and explained why you chose one
dreamed of possibilities and described how to make them probabilities