The Linux Foundation provides a neutral, trusted hub for developers and organizations to code, manage, and scale open technology projects and ecosystems.

The Linux Foundation

We are the Open Future, and we believe that an open internet is possible. One that maximizes societal benefits of shared data, knowledge and culture.

Open Future

At the ODI, our mission is to work with companies and governments to build an open, trustworthy data ecosystem.

Open Data Institute (ODI)

cOAlition S is an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of one target and 10 principles.

cOAlition S

W3C develops technical standards, specifications and guidelines through a process designed to maximize consensus.

W3C Web standards introduction

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice.

Open Source Initiative (OSI)

Open Standards -

Open source describes software where the source code is available for anyone to view, use, change, and then share. Making source code publicly available allows others to build on and learn from it, enabling broad collaboration from people around the world.

It's in your phone, your car, your TV, and your wifi-connected light bulbs. Open source components enable engineers to build on the work of a global community of developers to deliver better products faster and at lower cost. Linux, the Apache web server, Android, Firefox, and WordPress are examples of open source projects you may have heard of.

 "open source" as a business-friendly way to talk about free software principles.

 (OSD), maintained by OSI, is the commonly agreed-upon definition of what makes an open source license. It's built on the 

, an earlier set of rules for defining "free software".

Beyond ensuring access to the source code, the OSD includes 10 core principles that further require all open source licenses to include the right to free distribution and the freedom for anyone to create derived works and use the software for any purpose.

 that are designed for different purposes and have been reviewed for compliance with the OSD.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance and many of the big tech companies like Google and many other OSI 

 recognize the OSD as the definition of open source and OSI's 

 as the maintainer of the OSD. Licenses which do not comply with the OSD might still provide access to the source code, but they're not "open source".

Open Source

Open Education

Jonathan Rowe eloquently describes the commons as “the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness and flowing water—all are parts of the commons. So are language and knowledge, sidewalks and public squares, the stories of childhood and the processes of democracy. 

Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature, others the product of human endeavor. Some are new, such as the Internet; others are as ancient as soil and calligraphy.” 

ObiOne.io focus on our current era of digital commons, a commons of human-produced works. This commons cuts across a broad range of areas including cultural heritage, education, research, technology, art, design, literature, entertainment, business, and data. 

Human-produced works in all these areas are increasingly digital. The Internet is a kind of global, digital commons. The individuals, organizations, and businesses we profile in our case studies use Creative Commons to share their resources online over the Internet. 

The commons is not just about shared resources, however. It’s also about the social practices and values that manage them. A resource is a noun, but to common—to put the resource into the commons—is a verb.2 The creators, organizations, and businesses we profile are all engaged with commoning. Their use of Creative Commons involves them in the social practice of commoning, managing resources in a collective manner with a community of users. 

Commoning is guided by a set of values and norms that balance the costs and benefits of the enterprise with those of the community. Special regard is given to equitable access, use, and sustainability.

ObiOne.io

An open source license has two key parts: rights and obligations. Rights define things you are allowed to do. These directly correspond with the exclusive rights protected by copyright law. Obligations identify things you must do in return for those rights.

For example, the 

 includes "the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, [...]". In exchange, the user is obliged to include the copyright notice and license text in all copies of the software.

If your intent is to collaborate with others, you should explicitly license your code because it protects both your rights and those of any collaborators.

Copyright reserves the right to copy, modify, and distribute a creative work exclusively to the copyright holder. It exists to protect the rights of authors, artists, and other creators, allowing them to control if and how their work is used by others. In most countries, it automatically applies the moment the work is created.

Just because you can see or access a copyrighted work, it doesn't necessarily mean you can use or copy it.

In order to work together with others, you need a way to share those reserved rights. A license provides a framework to do that.

Without the right license,
it's not really open source

An effective open source license is one which allows for broad use, modification, and sharing of the code, without onerous restrictions. Ambiguous or vague licenses that don't explicitly grant the rights protected by copyright are problematic because they're open to interpretation. Additionally, if you're not absolutely certain you can comply with the obligations of a software license, you probably shouldn't use the software. If there is ever a legal challenge, you don't want to have to worry about the outcome.

The most popular licences are the 

. The best way to avoid wondering if a particular license is safe to use is to choose one of 

 They've undergone rigorous review by the open source legal community.

For things that aren't code, such as documentation or artwork, Creative Commons provides a 

License and Copyright

Open data, especially open government data, is a tremendous resource that is as yet largely untapped. Many individuals and organisations collect a broad range of different types of data in order to perform their tasks. Government is particularly significant in this respect, both because of the quantity and centrality of the data it collects, but also because most of that government data is public data by law, and therefore could be made open and made available for others to use. Why is that of interest?

There are many areas where we can expect open data to be of value, and where examples of how it has been used already exist. There are also many different groups of people and organisations who can benefit from the availability of open data, including government itself. At the same time it is impossible to predict precisely how and where value will be created in the future. The nature of innovation is that developments often comes from unlikely places.

It is already possible to point to a large number of areas where open government data is creating value. Some of these areas include:

Improved or new private products and services

Improved efficiency of government services

Improved effectiveness of government services

New knowledge from combined data sources and patterns in large data volumes

Economically, open data is of great importance as well. Several studies have estimated the economic value of open data at several tens of billions of Euros annually in the EU alone. New products and companies are re-using open data. The Danish husetsweb.dk helps you to find ways of improving the energy efficiency of your home, including financial planning and finding builders who can do the work. It is based on re-using cadastral information and information about government subsidies, as well as the local trade register. Google Translate uses the enormous volume of EU documents that appear in all European languages to train the translation algorithms, thus improving its quality of service.

Open data is also of value for government itself. For example, it can increase government efficiency. The Dutch Ministry of Education has published all of their education-related data online for re-use. Since then, the number of questions they receive has dropped, reducing work-load and costs, and the remaining questions are now also easier for civil servants to answer, because it is clear where the relevant data can be found. Open data is also making government more effective, which ultimately also reduces costs. The Dutch department for cultural heritage is actively releasing their data and collaborating with amateur historical societies and groups such as the Wikimedia Foundation in order to execute their own tasks more effectively. This not only results in improvements to the quality of their data, but will also ultimately make the department smaller.

While there are numerous instances of the ways in which open data is already creating both social and economic value, we don’t yet know what new things will become possible. New combinations of data can create new knowledge and insights, which can lead to whole new fields of application. We have seen this in the past, for example when Dr. Snow discovered the relationship between drinking water pollution and cholera in London in the 19th century, by combining data about cholera deaths with the location of water wells. This led to the building of London’s sewage systems, and hugely improved the general health of the population. We are likely to see such developments happening again as unexpected insights flow from the combination of different open data sets.

This untapped potential can be unleashed if we turn public government data into open data. This will only happen, however, if it is really open, i.e. if there are no restrictions (legal, financial or technological) to its re-use by others. Every restriction will exclude people from re-using the public data, and make it harder to find valuable ways of doing that. For the potential to be realized, public data needs to be open data.

Open data

Who gives permission to use material offered under Creative Commons licenses?

Our licenses and legal tools are intended for use by anyone who holds copyright in the material. This is often, but not always, the creator.

Creative Commons offers licenses and tools to the public free of charge and does not require that creators or other rights holders register with CC in order to apply a CC license to a work. This means that CC does not have special knowledge of who uses the licenses and for what purposes, nor does CC have a way to contact creators beyond means generally available to the public. CC has no authority to grant permission on behalf of those persons, nor does CC manage those rights on behalf of others.

If you would like to obtain additional permissions to use the work beyond those granted by the license that has been applied, or if you’re not sure if your intended use is permitted by the license, you should contact the rights holder.

Who gives permission to use material offered under CC licenses?

What are "contributor agreements"? Are they like open source licenses?

Many open source projects will only accept patches (code contributions or documentation contributions) from people who have submitted a legal document known as a 

 open source licenses — rather, they are a way for the contributor to tell the project that it has the right to distribute the new contributions under the project's existing open source license. (Some contributor agreements also allow for the project to distribute the contributions under other open source licenses too, which enables projects to change their license in the future, and some agreements even allow the project to distribute the contributions under 

There are two kinds of contributor agreements. In a 

, the original contributor retains copyright ownership of their contributions, but grants the project a broad set of rights such that the project can incorporate and distribute the contributions as it needs to. In a 

, the contributor actually transfers copyright ownership of the contributions to the project, who can then license it however they want since they own it (but a CAA typically grants very broad non-exclusive rights back to the contributor so that they too can use, distribute, sublicense etc their contribution freely).

With both CLAs and CAAs, it is of course necessary that "the project" be some kind of legal entity able to enter into agreements. Sometimes the project is incorporated itself, usually as a non-profit entity; sometimes it is represented by an umbrella non-profit organization (such as the 

); sometimes a for-profit corporation considers itself the main sponsor of the project and requests contributor agreements in order to manage the development community and maintain a public distribution of the software in question.

For more about contributor agreements in general, and some examples, see 

, "...a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software (FOSS)."

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? 

We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative. 

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. 

Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses. Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here. Also, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

Can I write proprietary code that links to a shared library that's open source?

Sometimes you can; it depends on the Open Source license. Authors often want you to be able to do this, so most shared libraries are licensed under a permissive license or one that allows linking under certain circumstances (e.g., the LGPL). 

A very small number of libraries use the GPL, which only allows linking with proprietary works if the licensor grants an explicit exception. Thus, you are wise to check the licenses that your program links to. The community expects that all code linked to GPL code will be licensed under the GPL, even if the link is made at runtime using a shared library.

What is a "permissive" Open Source license?

 A "permissive" license is simply a non-copyleft open source license — one that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify, and redistribute, but that permits proprietary derivative works. 

What is "copyleft"? Is it the same as "open source"?

"Copyleft" refers to licenses that allow derivative works but require them to use the same license as the original work. For example, if you write some software and release it under the GNU General Public License (a widely-used copyleft license), and then someone else modifies that software and distributes their modified version, the modified version must be licensed under the GNU GPL too — including any new code written specifically to go into the modified version. Both the original and the new work are Open Source; the copyleft license simply ensures that property is perpetuated to all downstream derivatives. (There is at least one copyleft license, the Affero GPL, that even requires you to offer the source code, under the AGPL, to anyone to whom you make the software's functionality available as a network service — however, most copyleft licenses activate their share-and-share-alike requirement on distribution of a copy of the software itself. You should read the license to understand its requirements for source code distribution.)

Most copyleft licenses are Open Source, but not all Open Source licenses are copyleft. When an Open Source license is not copyleft, that means software released under that license can be used as part of programs distributed under other licenses, including proprietary (non-open-source) licenses. For example, the BSD license is a non-copyleft Open Source license. Such licenses are usually called either "non-copyleft" or "permissive" open source licenses

Copyleft provisions apply only to actual derivatives, that is, cases where an existing copylefted work was modified. Merely distributing a copyleft work alongside a non-copyleft work does not cause the latter to fall under the copyleft terms.

CC licenses are operative only when applied to material in which a copyright exists, and even then only when a particular use would otherwise not be permitted by copyright. Note that the latest version of CC licenses also applies to rights similar to copyright, such as neighboring rights and sui generis database rights. Learn more about the scope of the licenses. 

This means that CC license terms and conditions are not triggered by uses permitted under any applicable exceptions and limitations to copyright, nor do license terms and conditions apply to elements of a licensed work that are in the public domain. 

This also means that CC licenses do not contractually impose restrictions on uses of a work where there is no underlying copyright. This feature (and others) distinguish CC licenses from some other open licenses like the ODbL and ODC-BY, both of which are intended to impose contractual conditions and restrictions on the reuse of databases in jurisdictions where there is no underlying copyright or sui generis database right.

All CC licenses are non-exclusive: creators and owners can enter into additional, different licensing arrangements for the same material at any time (often referred to as “dual-licensing” or “multi-licensing”). However, CC licenses are not revocable once granted unless there has been a breach, and even then the license is terminated only for the breaching licensee.

Please note that CC0 is not a license; it is a public domain dedication. When CC0 is applied to a work, copyright no longer applies to the work in most jurisdictions around the world. Therefore, references to dual licensing arrangements like the one above are inapplicable to CC0.

How do CC licenses operate and how do the CC license terms work?

What is an open file format and why is it different from a proprietary file format?

An open file format is a file format with no restrictions, monetary or otherwise, placed upon its use and can be fully processed with at least one free/libre/open-source software tool.

Patents are a common source of restrictions that make a format proprietary. Often, but not necessarily, the structure of an open format is set out in agreed standards, overseen and published by a non-commercial expert body. A file in an open format enjoys the guarantee that it can be correctly read by a range of different software programs or used to pass information between them.

Can I call my program "Open Source" even if I don't use an approved license?

Without the right license, it's not really open source so we would ask you to not do that. If you call it "Open Source" without using an approved license, you will confuse people. 

This is not merely a theoretical concern — we have seen this confusion happen in the past, and it's part of the reason why there is a formal license approval process. See also the OSI page on license proliferation for why this is a problem. An effective open source license is one which allows for broad use, modification, and sharing of the code, without onerous restrictions. 

Ambiguous or vague licenses that don't explicitly grant the rights protected by copyright are problematic because they're open to interpretation. Additionally, if you're not absolutely certain you can comply with the obligations of a software license, you probably shouldn't use the software. If there is ever a legal challenge, you don't want to have to worry about the outcome. 

The most popular licences are the MIT, GPL, and Apache. The best way to avoid wondering if a particular license is safe to use is to choose one of these generally accepted licenses. They've undergone rigorous review by the open source legal community.

Arduino is a for-profit open-source electronics platform and computer hardware and software company. Founded in 2005 in Italy.

Revenue model: charging for physical copies (sales of boards, modules, shields, and kits), licensing a trademark (fees paid by those who want to sell Arduino products using their name)

Interviewees: David Cuartielles and Tom Igoe, cofounders

In 2005, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in northern Italy, teachers and students needed an easy way to use electronics and programming to quickly prototype design ideas. As musicians, artists, and designers, they needed a platform that didn’t require engineering expertise. A group of teachers and students, including Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis, built a platform that combined different open technologies. They called it Arduino. The platform integrated software, hardware, microcontrollers, and electronics. All aspects of the platform were openly licensed: hardware designs and documentation with the Attribution-Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA), and software with the GNU General Public License.

Arduino boards are able to read inputs—light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message—and turn it into outputs—activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. You send a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board by using the Arduino programming language and Arduino software (based on a piece of open-source software called Processing, a programming tool used to make visual art).

“The reasons for making Arduino open source are complicated,” Tom says. Partly it was about supporting flexibility. The open-source nature of Arduino empowers users to modify it and create a lot of different variations, adding on top of what the founders build. David says this “ended up strengthening the platform far beyond what we had even thought of building.”

For Tom another factor was the impending closure of the Ivrea design school. He’d seen other organizations close their doors and all their work and research just disappear. Open-sourcing ensured that Arduino would outlive the Ivrea closure. Persistence is one thing Tom really likes about open source. If key people leave, or a company shuts down, an open-source product lives on. In Tom’s view, “Open sourcing makes it easier to trust a

With the school closing, David and some of the other Arduino founders started a consulting firm and multidisciplinary design studio they called Tinker, in London. Tinker designed products and services that bridged the digital and the physical, and they taught people how to use new technologies in creative ways. Revenue from Tinker was invested in sustaining and enhancing Arduino.

For Tom, part of Arduino’s success is because the founders made themselves the first customer of their product. They made products they themselves personally wanted. It was a matter of “I need this thing,” not “If we make this, we’ll make a lot of money.” Tom notes that being your own first customer makes you more confident and convincing at selling your product.

Arduino’s business model has evolved over time—and Tom says model is a grandiose term for it. Originally, they just wanted to make a few boards and get them out into the world. They started out with two hundred boards, sold them, and made a little profit. They used that to make another thousand, which generated enough revenue to make five thousand. In the early days, they simply tried to generate enough funding to keep the venture going day to day. When they hit the ten thousand mark, they started to think about Arduino as a company. By then it was clear you can open-source the design but still manufacture the physical product. As long as it’s a quality product and sold at a reasonable price, people will buy it.

Arduino now has a worldwide community of makers—students, hobbyists, artists, programmers, and professionals. Arduino provides a wiki called Playground (a wiki is where all users can edit and add pages, contributing to and benefiting from collective research). People share code, circuit diagrams, tutorials, DIY instructions, and tips and tricks, and show off their projects. In addition, there’s a multilanguage discussion forum where users can get help using Arduino, discuss topics like robotics, and make suggestions for new Arduino product designs. As of January 2017, 324,928 members had made 2,989,489 posts on 379,044 topics. The worldwide community of makers has contributed an incredible amount of accessible knowledge helpful to novices and experts alike.

Transitioning Arduino from a project to a company was a big step. Other businesses who made boards were charging a lot of money for them. Arduino wanted to make theirs available at a low price to people across a wide range of industries. As with any business, pricing was key. They wanted prices that would get lots of customers but were also high enough to sustain the business.

For a business, getting to the end of the year and not being in the red is a success. Arduino may have an open-licensing strategy, but they are still a business, and all the things needed to successfully run one still apply. David says, “If you do those other things well, sharing things in an open-source way can only help you.”

While openly licensing the designs, documentation, and software ensures longevity, it does have risks. There’s a possibility that others will create knockoffs, clones, and copies. The CC BY-SA license means anyone can produce copies of their boards, redesign them, and even sell boards that copy the design. They don’t have to pay a license fee to Arduino or even ask permission. However, if they republish the design of the board, they have to give attribution to Arduino. If they change the design, they must release the new design using the same Creative Commons license to ensure that the new version is equally free and open.

Tom and David say that a lot of people have built companies off of Arduino, with dozens of Arduino derivatives out there. But in contrast to closed business models that can wring money out of the system over many years because there is no competition, Arduino founders saw competition as keeping them honest, and aimed for an environment of collaboration. A benefit of open over closed is the many new ideas and designs others have contributed back to the Arduino ecosystem, ideas and designs that Arduino and the Arduino community use and incorporate into new products.

Over time, the range of Arduino products has diversified, changing and adapting to new needs and challenges. In addition to simple entry level boards, new products have been added ranging from enhanced boards that provide advanced functionality and faster performance, to boards for creating Internet of Things applications, wearables, and 3-D printing. The full range of official Arduino products includes boards, modules (a smaller form-factor of classic boards), shields (elements that can be plugged onto a board to give it extra features), and kits.1

Arduino’s focus is on high-quality boards, well-designed support materials, and the building of community; this focus is one of the keys to their success. And being open lets you build a real community. David says Arduino’s community is a big strength and something that really does matter—in his words, “It’s good business.” When they started, the Arduino team had almost entirely no idea how to build a community. They started by conducting numerous workshops, working directly with people using the platform to make sure the hardware and software worked the way it was meant to work and solved people’s problems. The community grew organically from there.

A key decision for Arduino was trademarking the name. The founders needed a way to guarantee to people that they were buying a quality product from a company committed to open-source values and knowledge sharing. Trademarking the Arduino name and logo expresses that guarantee and helps customers easily identify their products, and the products sanctioned by them. If others want to sell boards using the Arduino name and logo, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This allows Arduino to scale up manufacturing and distribution while at the same time ensuring the Arduino brand isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.

Current official manufacturers are Smart Projects in Italy, SparkFun in the United States, and Dog Hunter in Taiwan/China. These are the only manufacturers that are allowed to use the Arduino logo on their boards. Trademarking their brand provided the founders with a way to protect Arduino, build it out further, and fund software and tutorial development. The trademark-licensing fee for the brand became Arduino’s revenue-generating model.

How far to open things up wasn’t always something the founders perfectly agreed on. David, who was always one to advocate for opening things up more, had some fears about protecting the Arduino name, thinking people would be mad if they policed their brand. There was some early backlash with a project called Freeduino, but overall, trademarking and branding has been a critical tool for Arduino.

David encourages people and businesses to start by sharing everything as a default strategy, and then think about whether there is anything that really needs to be protected and why. There are lots of good reasons to not open up certain elements. This strategy of sharing everything is certainly the complete opposite of how today’s world operates, where nothing is shared. Tom suggests a business formalize which elements are based on open sharing and which are closed. 

An Arduino blog post from 2013 entitled “Send In the Clones,” by one of the founders Massimo Banzi, does a great job of explaining the full complexities of how trademarking their brand has played out, distinguishing between official boards and those that are clones, derivatives, compatibles, and counterfeits.2

For David, an exciting aspect of Arduino is the way lots of people can use it to adapt technology in many different ways. Technology is always making more things possible but doesn’t always focus on making it easy to use and adapt. This is where Arduino steps in. Arduino’s goal is “making things that help other people make things.”

Arduino has been hugely successful in making technology and electronics reach a larger audience. For Tom, Arduino has been about “the democratization of technology.” Tom sees Arduino’s open-source strategy as helping the world get over the idea that technology has to be protected. Tom says, “Technology is a literacy everyone should learn.”

Ultimately, for Arduino, going open has been good business—good for product development, good for distribution, good for pricing, and good for manufacturing.

Arduino is a for-profit open-source electronics platform and computer hardware and software company.

Arduino

Revenue model: charging a transaction fee


Interviewees: Nick Ierodiaconou and Joni Steiner, cofounders

Opendesk is an online platform that connects furniture designers around the world not just with customers but also with local registered makers who bring the designs to life. Opendesk and the designer receive a portion of every sale that is made by a maker.

Cofounders Nick Ierodiaconou and Joni Steiner studied and worked as architects together. They also made goods. Their first client was Mint Digital, who had an interest in open licensing. Nick and Joni were exploring digital fabrication, and Mint’s interest in open licensing got them to thinking how the open-source world may interact and apply to physical goods. They sought to design something for their client that was also reproducible. As they put it, they decided to “ship the recipe, but not the goods.” They created the design using software, put it under an open license, and had it manufactured locally near the client. This was the start of the idea for Opendesk. The idea for Wikihouse—another open project dedicated to accessible housing for all—started as discussions around the same table. The two projects ultimately went on separate paths, with Wikihouse becoming a nonprofit foundation and Opendesk a for-profit company.

When Nick and Joni set out to create Opendesk, there were a lot of questions about the viability of distributed manufacturing. No one was doing it in a way that was even close to realistic or competitive. The design community had the intent, but fulfilling this vision was still a long way away.

And now this sector is emerging, and Nick and Joni are highly interested in the commercialization aspects of it. As part of coming up with a business model, they began investigating intellectual property and licensing options. It was a thorny space, especially for designs. Just what aspect of a design is copyrightable? What is patentable? How can allowing for digital sharing and distribution be balanced against the designer’s desire to still hold ownership? In the end, they decided there was no need to reinvent the wheel and settled on using Creative Commons.

When designing the Opendesk system, they had two goals. They wanted anyone, anywhere in the world, to be able to download designs so that they could be made locally, and they wanted a viable model that benefited designers when their designs were sold. Coming up with a business model was going to be complex.

They gave a lot of thought to three angles—the potential for social sharing, allowing designers to choose their license, and the impact these choices would have on the business model.

In support of social sharing, Opendesk actively advocates for (but doesn’t demand) open licensing. And Nick and Joni are agnostic about which Creative Commons license is used; it’s up to the designer. They can be proprietary or choose from the full suite of Creative Commons licenses, deciding for themselves how open or closed they want to be.

For the most part, designers love the idea of sharing content. They understand that you get positive feedback when you’re attributed, what Nick and Joni called “reputational glow.” And Opendesk does an awesome job profiling the designers.

While designers are largely OK with personal sharing, there is a concern that someone will take the design and manufacture the furniture in bulk, with the designer not getting any benefits. So most Opendesk designers choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

Anyone can download a design and make it themselves, provided it’s for noncommercial use — and there have been many, many downloads. Or users can buy the product from Opendesk, or from a registered maker in Opendesk’s network, for on-demand personal fabrication. The network of Opendesk makers currently is made up of those who do digital fabrication using a computer-controlled CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machining device that cuts shapes out of wooden sheets according to the specifications in the design file.

Makers benefit from being part of Opendesk’s network. Making furniture for local customers is paid work, and Opendesk generates business for them. Joni said, “Finding a whole network and community of makers was pretty easy because we built a site where people could write in about their capabilities. Building the community by learning from the maker community is how we have moved forward.” Opendesk now has relationships with hundreds of makers in countries all around the world.

The makers are a critical part of the Opendesk business model. Their model builds off the makers’ quotes. Here’s how it’s expressed on Opendesk’s website:

When customers buy an Opendesk product directly from a registered maker, they pay:

the manufacturing cost as set by the maker (this covers material and labour costs for the product to be manufactured and any extra assembly costs charged by the maker)

a design fee for the designer (a design fee that is paid to the designer every time their design is used)

a percentage fee to the Opendesk platform (this supports the infrastructure and ongoing development of the platform that helps us build out our marketplace)

a percentage fee to the channel through which the sale is made (at the moment this is Opendesk, but in the future we aim to open this up to third-party sellers who can sell Opendesk products through their own channels—this covers sales and marketing fees for the relevant channel)

a local delivery service charge (the delivery is typically charged by the maker, but in some cases may be paid to a third-party delivery partner)

charges for any additional services the customer chooses, such as on-site assembly (additional services are discretionary—in many cases makers will be happy to quote for assembly on-site and designers may offer bespoke design options)

local sales taxes (variable by customer and maker location)


They then go into detail how makers’ quotes are created:

When a customer wants to buy an Opendesk . . . they are provided with a transparent breakdown of fees including the manufacturing cost, design fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees. If a customer opts to buy by getting in touch directly with a registered local maker using a downloaded Opendesk file, the maker is responsible for ensuring the design fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees are included in any quote at the time of sale. Percentage fees are always based on the underlying manufacturing cost and are typically apportioned as follows:

manufacturing cost: fabrication, finishing and any other costs as set by the maker (excluding any services like delivery or on-site assembly)

design fee: 8 percent of the manufacturing cost

platform fee: 12 percent of the manufacturing cost

channel fee: 18 percent of the manufacturing cost

sales tax: as applicable (depends on product and location)

Opendesk shares revenue with their community of designers. According to Nick and Joni, a typical designer fee is around 2.5 percent, so Opendesk’s 8 percent is more generous, and providing a higher value to the designer.

The Opendesk website features stories of designers and makers. Denis Fuzii published the design for the Valovi Chair from his studio in São Paulo. His designs have been downloaded over five thousand times in ninety-five countries. I.J. CNC Services is Ian Jinks, a professional maker based in the United Kingdom. Opendesk now makes up a large proportion of his business.

To manage resources and remain effective, Opendesk has so far focused on a very narrow niche—primarily office furniture of a certain simple aesthetic, which uses only one type of material and one manufacturing technique. This allows them to be more strategic and more disruptive in the market, by getting things to market quickly with competitive prices. It also reflects their vision of creating reproducible and functional pieces.

On their website, Opendesk describes what they do as “open making”: “Designers get a global distribution channel. Makers get profitable jobs and new customers. You get designer products without the designer price tag, a more social, eco-friendly alternative to mass-production and an affordable way to buy custom-made products.”

Nick and Joni say that customers like the fact that the furniture has a known provenance. People really like that their furniture was designed by a certain international designer but was made by a maker in their local community; it’s a great story to tell. It certainly sets apart Opendesk furniture from the usual mass-produced items from a store.

Nick and Joni are taking a community-based approach to define and evolve Opendesk and the “open making” business model. They’re engaging thought leaders and practitioners to define this new movement. They have a separate Open Making site, which includes a manifesto, a field guide, and an invitation to get involved in the Open Making community.4 People can submit ideas and discuss the principles and business practices they’d like to see used.

Nick and Joni talked a lot with us about intellectual property (IP) and commercialization. Many of their designers fear the idea that someone could take one of their design files and make and sell infinite number of pieces of furniture with it. As a consequence, most Opendesk designers choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

Opendesk established a set of principles for what their community considers commercial and noncommercial use. Their website states:

It is unambiguously commercial use when anyone:

charges a fee or makes a profit when making an Opendesk

sells (or bases a commercial service on) an Opendesk

It follows from this that noncommercial use is when you make an Opendesk yourself, with no intention to gain commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For example, these qualify as noncommercial:

you are an individual with your own CNC machine, or access to a shared CNC machine, and will personally cut and make a few pieces of furniture yourself

you are a student (or teacher) and you use the design files for educational purposes or training (and do not intend to sell the resulting pieces)

you work for a charity and get furniture cut by volunteers, or by employees at a fab lab or maker space

Whether or not people technically are doing things that implicate IP, Nick and Joni have found that people tend to comply with the wishes of creators out of a sense of fairness. They have found that behavioral economics can replace some of the thorny legal issues. In their business model, Nick and Joni are trying to suspend the focus on IP and build an open business model that works for all stakeholders—designers, channels, manufacturers, and customers. For them, the value Opendesk generates hangs off “open,” not IP.

The mission of Opendesk is about relocalizing manufacturing, which changes the way we think about how goods are made. Commercialization is integral to their mission, and they’ve begun to focus on success metrics that track how many makers and designers are engaged through Opendesk in revenue-making work.

As a global platform for local making, Opendesk’s business model has been built on honesty, transparency, and inclusivity. As Nick and Joni describe it, they put ideas out there that get traction and then have faith in people.

Opendesk is a for-profit company offering an online platform that connects furniture designers around the world with customers and local makers who bring the designs to life. 

OpenDesk

The Blender Institute is an animation studio that creates 3-D films using Blender software. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands.

 crowdfunding (subscription-based), charging for physical copies, selling merchandise

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

For Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender software and its related entities, sharing is practical. Making their 3-D content creation software available under a free software license has been integral to its development and popularity. Using that software to make movies that were licensed with Creative Commons pushed that development even further. Sharing enables people to participate and to interact with and build upon the technology and content they create in a way that benefits Blender and its community in concrete ways.

Each open-movie project Blender runs produces a host of openly licensed outputs, not just the final film itself but all of the source material as well. The creative process also enhances the development of the Blender software because the technical team responds directly to the needs of the film production team, creating tools and features that make their lives easier. And, of course, each project involves a long, rewarding process for the creative and technical community working together.

Rather than just talking about the theoretical benefits of sharing and free culture, Ton is very much about doing and making free culture. Blender’s production coordinator Francesco Siddi told us, “Ton believes if you don’t make content using your tools, then you’re not doing anything.”

Blender’s history begins in the late 1990s, when Ton created the Blender software. Originally, the software was an in-house resource for his animation studio based in the Netherlands. Investors became interested in the software, so he began marketing the software to the public, offering a free version in addition to a paid version. Sales were disappointing, and his investors gave up on the endeavor in the early 2000s. He made a deal with investors—if he could raise enough money, he could then make the Blender software available under the GNU General Public License.

This was long before Kickstarter and other online crowdfunding sites existed, but Ton ran his own version of a crowdfunding campaign and quickly raised the money he needed. The Blender software became freely available for anyone to use. Simply applying the General Public License to the software, however, was not enough to create a thriving community around it. Francesco told us, “Software of this complexity relies on people and their vision of how people work together. Ton is a fantastic community builder and manager, and he put a lot of work into fostering a community of developers so that the project could live.”

Like any successful free and open-source software project, Blender developed quickly because the community could make fixes and improvements. “Software should be free and open to hack,” Francesco said. “Otherwise, everyone is doing the same thing in the dark for ten years.” Ton set up the Blender Foundation to oversee and steward the software development and maintenance.

After a few years, Ton began looking for new ways to push development of the software. He came up with the idea of creating CC-licensed films using the Blender software. Ton put a call online for all interested and skilled artists. Francesco said the idea was to get the best artists available, put them in a building together with the best developers, and have them work together. They would not only produce high-quality openly licensed content, they would improve the Blender software in the process.

They turned to crowdfunding to subsidize the costs of the project. They had about twenty people working full-time for six to ten months, so the costs were significant. Francesco said that when their crowdfunding campaign succeeded, people were astounded. “The idea that making money was possible by producing CC-licensed material was mind-blowing to people,” he said. “They were like, ‘I have to see it to believe it.’”

The first film, which was released in 2006, was an experiment. It was so successful that Ton decided to set up the Blender Institute, an entity dedicated to hosting open-movie projects. The Blender Institute’s next project was an even bigger success. The film, Big Buck Bunny, went viral, and its animated characters were picked up by marketers.

Francesco said that, over time, the Blender Institute projects have gotten bigger and more prominent. That means the filmmaking process has become more complex, combining technical experts and artists who focus on storytelling. Francesco says the process is almost on an industrial scale because of the number of moving parts. This requires a lot of specialized assistance, but the Blender Institute has no problem finding the talent it needs to help on projects. “Blender hardly does any recruiting for film projects because the talent emerges naturally,” Francesco said. “So many people want to work with us, and we can’t always hire them because of budget constraints.”

Blender has had a lot of success raising money from its community over the years. In many ways, the pitch has gotten easier to make. Not only is crowdfunding simply more familiar to the public, but people know and trust Blender to deliver, and Ton has developed a reputation as an effective community leader and visionary for their work. “There is a whole community who sees and understands the benefit of these projects,” Francesco said.

While these benefits of each open-movie project make a compelling pitch for crowdfunding campaigns, Francesco told us the Blender Institute has found some limitations in the standard crowdfunding model where you propose a specific project and ask for funding. “Once a project is over, everyone goes home,” he said. “It is great fun, but then it ends. That is a problem.”

To make their work more sustainable, they needed a way to receive ongoing support rather than on a project-by-project basis. Their solution is Blender Cloud, a subscription-style crowdfunding model akin to the online crowdfunding platform, Patreon. For about ten euros each month, subscribers get access to download everything the Blender Institute produces—software, art, training, and more. All of the assets are available under an Attribution license (CC BY) or placed in the public domain (CC0), but they are initially made available only to subscribers. Blender Cloud enables subscribers to follow Blender’s movie projects as they develop, sharing detailed information and content used in the creative process. Blender Cloud also has extensive training materials and libraries of characters and other assets used in various projects.

The continuous financial support provided by Blender Cloud subsidizes five to six full-time employees at the Blender Institute. Francesco says their goal is to grow their subscriber base. “This is our freedom,” he told us, “and for artists, freedom is everything.”

Blender Cloud is the primary revenue stream of the Blender Institute. The Blender Foundation is funded primarily by donations, and that money goes toward software development and maintenance. The revenue streams of the Institute and Foundation are deliberately kept separate. Blender also has other revenue streams, such as the Blender Store, where people can purchase DVDs, T-shirts, and other Blender products.

Ton has worked on projects relating to his Blender software for nearly twenty years. Throughout most of that time, he has been committed to making the software and the content produced with the software free and open. Selling a license has never been part of the business model.

Since 2006, he has been making films available along with all of their source material. He says he has hardly ever seen people stepping into Blender’s shoes and trying to make money off of their content. Ton believes this is because the true value of what they do is in the creative and production process. “Even when you share everything, all your original sources, it still takes a lot of talent, skills, time, and budget to reproduce what you did,” Ton said.

For Ton and Blender, it all comes back to doing.

Blender Institute

The Noun Project creates and shares visual language. There are millions who use Noun Project symbols to simplify communication across borders, languages, and cultures.

The original idea for the Noun Project came to cofounder Edward Boatman while he was a student in architecture design school. He’d always done a lot of sketches and started to draw what used to fascinate him as a child, like trains, sequoias, and bulldozers. He began thinking how great it would be if he had a simple image or small icon of every single object or concept on the planet.

When Edward went on to work at an architecture firm, he had to make a lot of presentation boards for clients. But finding high-quality sources for symbols and icons was difficult. He couldn’t find any website that could provide them. Perhaps his idea for creating a library of icons could actually help people in similar situations.

With his partner, Sofya Polyakov, he began collecting symbols for a website and writing a business plan. Inspiration came from the book Professor and the Madman, which chronicles the use of crowdsourcing to create the Oxford English Dictionary in 1870. Edward began to imagine crowdsourcing icons and symbols from volunteer designers around the world.

Then Edward got laid off during the recession, which turned out to be a huge catalyst. He decided to give his idea a go, and in 2010 Edward and Sofya launched the Noun Project with a Kickstarter campaign, back when Kickstarter was in its infancy.1 They thought it’d be a good way to introduce the global web community to their idea. Their goal was to raise $1,500, but in twenty days they got over $14,000. They realized their idea had the potential to be something much bigger.

They created a platform where symbols and icons could be uploaded, and Edward began recruiting talented designers to contribute their designs, a process he describes as a relatively easy sell. Lots of designers have old drawings just gathering “digital dust” on their hard drives. It’s easy to convince them to finally share them with the world.

The Noun Project currently has about seven thousand designers from around the world. But not all submissions are accepted. The Noun Project’s quality-review process means that only the best works become part of its collection. They make sure to provide encouraging, constructive feedback whenever they reject a piece of work, which maintains and builds the relationship they have with their global community of designers.

Creative Commons is an integral part of the Noun Project’s business model; this decision was inspired by Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of Radical Price, which introduced Edward to the idea that you could build a business model around free content.

The Noun Project creates and shares visual language to simplify communication across borders, languages, and cultures.

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