FusionGirl Wiki:Licensing
This wiki and the associated source repository are published under a three-license structure chosen to allow open dissemination while preventing the work from being closed-shelved, relabeled, or patented by third parties. The wiki is additionally a defensive publication.
Licenses at a glance
| Material | License |
|---|---|
| Wiki text, documentation, written material | CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) |
| Hardware designs (schematics, BOMs, CAD, mechanical) | CERN-OHL-S v2 (Strongly Reciprocal Open Hardware Licence) |
| Source code (firmware, services, tools) | GPL-3.0-or-later (and AGPL-3.0 for network services) |
Why this stack
The goal: anyone may copy, study, modify, and build on this work — but derivatives must remain open under the same terms, the author's name must remain attached, and no participant may use patents to attack downstream users.
- CC BY-SA 4.0 (text): preserves attribution (BY); forces derivatives
to remain under the same license (SA); includes a patent grant and an anti-DRM clause.
- CERN-OHL-S v2 (hardware): the hardware-engineering analog of GPL.
Anyone who manufactures or distributes hardware based on a published design must publish their own modifications under the same terms.
- GPL-3.0 (code): strong copyleft including a patent grant + patent
retaliation and explicit anti-Tivoization. A closed fork is not legally permitted.
Defensive publication
Every revision of this wiki is published as a defensive publication. The publication date and content are intended to constitute prior art under 35 U.S.C. § 102 and equivalent international patent law, for the purpose of preventing the patenting of the disclosed subject matter and its obvious extensions by third parties.
The author makes no claim to patent the disclosed work and reserves no patent rights to enforce against good-faith reusers. The licenses above contain the cooperative-reuse machinery; this notice handles the anti-patent function.
Device pages carry the {{Defensive-publication}}
stamp to make the prior-art status explicit at the point of disclosure.
Practical reuse guidance
You may, without asking:
- Read, copy, mirror, and redistribute any wiki content.
- Build, modify, and ship hardware or software based on these designs.
- Quote, translate, or remix the wiki and documentation.
- Use any of this material in research, teaching, journalism, or
operational practice.
You must:
- Preserve attribution to the original author(s).
- Apply the same license to your derivative (or a compatible license per
each license's compatibility clauses).
- Make your design files or source code available to recipients of the
derivative work.
You may not:
- Re-license this work under a more restrictive license.
- Apply DRM or technical measures that prevent further reuse.
- Use patents to attack downstream users — doing so terminates your
license under all three documents.
Historical note
This wiki was originally licensed CC-BY 4.0. The transition to CC BY-SA 4.0 + defensive-publication notice was made deliberately to close the "embrace-extend-classify" failure mode of permissive licensing, in which a well-resourced party could fork the work, develop derivatives, and then keep those derivatives closed or apply for patents on them. Share-alike forces the openness to remain; defensive publication forces the prior art to remain unpatentable. The combination is the author's chosen instrument for anti-censorship publication of suppressed or marginal sciences and the Psi-Tech roster.
Not legal advice
This page is a summary, not legal counsel. For commercially significant reuse, consult an attorney familiar with open-source and open-hardware licensing.
