This project discusses differences between the three CERN Open Source Hardware Licenses. There are multiple versions of these licenses but we will only consider the most current which is version 2.0. This version of the CERN licenses comes in three variants: The permissive variant, generally called CERN-OHL-P, is akin to the BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses and aims to offer similar protections but more targeted towards hardware. The weakly reciprocal variant, CERN-OHL-W, is akin to the LGPL software license, and the strongly reciprocal variant, CERN-OHL-S has similar goals as the GPL license. From here on, we will call the licenses P, W, and S for the permissive, weakly reciprocal, and strongly reciprocal versions respectively.
We will start our discussion by considering a textual diff of the three licenses starting with a comparison between S and W. We will then compare W and P.
In addition to this comparison, this project discusses several use-cases that help to understand the specifics of the three license variants.