Licensing and upstreaming

[marcan]

I see the project has no stated license. Would you be willing to license these footprints and 3D models under the KiCad libraries license? That way they can be freely used by others under the standard conditions (right now, there is no clear way to legally use these files in other projects).

Also, are you interested in upstreaming these parts into the official KiCad libraries?

[SnowMB]

I am fine with the license. Thanks for the hint. I will add it soon.

In regards to upstreaming: I haven't generated a pull request to the KiCad repositories because of the following reasons:

• The models / footprints are incomplete for available parts of this connector family. There are some pin numbers missing
• I don't have the source files for the 3d models. A friend of mine generated these for me in solid works and gave me just the step files.
• I haven't had the time yet to check if the footprint is compliant with the library conventions according to naming, pin numbering and so on

I might work on this points in the future (and add more parts from my private library) but in the mean time anyone can just get the stuff from here and use it in his projects or use this as a reference for doing their own footprints.

[marcan]

Hi, just a friendly reminder. We'd like to use one of the models for the 3D render of https://github.com/GlasgowEmbedded/Glasgow, which is just about complete, but we can't do that without the license clarification :-)

[marcan]

Ah, nevermind; I just realized that your version is reversed from what we need (latch facing down, ours faces up). I ended up making my own 3D model and footprint based off of the upstream vertical one. Sorry for the noise; we're in no rush now.

Would still be nice to have the license change at some point, since other people might be interested in using the ones in this orientation :-)

[SnowMB]

Do you know if copy + pasting the license from the kicad library repos is suitable? The wording seems a bit off to me for using it on another library.

[marcan]

The only thing that matters is the beginning of the text, the rest is just explanatory. The wording can just be tweaked slightly. Something like this:

---

KiCad Libraries License

These KiCad libraries are licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 License, with the following exception:

---

To the extent that the creation of electronic designs that use 'Licensed Material' can be considered to be 'Adapted Material', then the copyright holder waives article 3 of the license with respect to these designs and any generated files which use data provided as part of the 'Licensed Material'.

---

Everything after that is just explanatory, you could copy it and adapt the text, but I don't think it's necessary.