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Licenses

The core mission of FieldKit is to make environmental monitoring accessible to everyone on this planet. This not only includes the design and manufacturing of those tools, but also the free distribution of knowledge around the engineering, education, science, and communication around environmental sensing. As such, it is our desire that, as much as possible, every single part of anything FieldKit is involved with is kept completely open for anyone to use, leverage, learn from, build upon, modify, and improve.

One of the things that many in the open source community (even us, at times) struggle with  is licensing. It can be hard to understand. We have chosen certain licenses for FieldKit that align with our desires to be broadly open source but still offer appropriate protections.

The term “FieldKit” is a fully registered trademark word mark and the logo design of Multiplier.org and FieldKit.org. Please reach out if you have any questions on usage.   

FieldKit Website: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License

All of the text, images, and diagrams on FieldKit.org are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. This means that you can copy or reprint the content here, but only if it is properly cited and referenced to us. You also can’t sell or make money off this content. This includes all the content around our technical documentation and tutorial materials.

FieldKit Hardware: CERN Open Hardware Licence v2

Our hardware designs fall under version 2 of the CERN Open Hardware (CERN-OHL-P) license. This gives you the right to open, hack, modify, incorporate, and break any of the designs that we create for FieldKit. This version doesn’t require you to redistribute under the same license, but in the interest of open source conservation technology, we would hope that you would also open your designs as well. 

FieldKit Software: Berkeley Software Distribution

Our software work, including device firmware, the data visualization portal, and all website code is covered under a 3-Clause Berkeley Software Distribution license. That license is as follows:

Copyright(c) 2021, FieldKit

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

FieldKit Data: CC0 Public Domain 

The data on FieldKit.org, if marked as open by the user, falls under a CC0 “No Rights Reserved” designation. This means that the data shown here is free and open to the public domain for anyone to use under any circumstances. This sort of environmental data impacts us all, and it is important for that to be available to anyone who can use it to better understand and protect this planet. Our platform allows for projects to be marked as private (which would protect this data from others – particularly important in situations of environmental justice or sensitive locations), but all open (non-private) data would default to CC0. This would allow others to freely build upon, enhance, and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. You aren’t legally required to attribute this data to us or the users that collected it, but there is hope that you would credit it on ethical grounds.   

FieldKit copyrightable, non-text works: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

Any copyrightable, non-text works, hardware reference designs, or similar content on our page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You can remix or copy these to republish, but you have to credit FieldKit as the original source and publish your work under the same license. This will not allow copyrights of this derivative work. 

Content Developed in Collaboration with FieldKit

FieldKit will often collaborate with partners  on projects to increase access to and visibility of science, conservation, education, and more. All hardware, software, and other content developed by the FieldKit team in collaboration with partners is understood to be licensed under the above relevant licenses.