A note on software and hardware licenses

There are specialised licenses designed for publishing open source software code and hardware designs. These licenses are conceptually equivalent to the CC BY and CC BY-SA licenses described earlier, but are written to address technical aspects unique to software and hardware. Without going into details here, the website  choosealicense.com helps you apply an open source license to software. For hardware, the main “go-to” license is one of the CERN Open Hardware Licenses. The European Union-funded Open!Next project has produced a short explainer of open source licenses for hardware. In any case, always include the full text of the license you chose in a text file to accompany your software code or hardware design files.