I'm probably going to alienate half of you by starting off with this: I don't like Josef Prusa and I don't like his printers. So I find myself in the awkward and not particularly pleasant position of having to admit that when it comes to open source hardware licenses, he has some pretty good points.
Existing open source licenses simply don't work for everyone, and there's this weird binary-style of thinking that they should, and that if they don't, you, the business owner are doing something wrong. I'm here to tell you that you're not. You're doing the best you can in a fucked-up world where small businesses and independent creators basically have no resources, are regularly ripped off, and aren't able to fight a battle in a legal system that is too expensive and slow to respond to anything before you'll be put out of business, not to mention a legal system that definitely doesn't give a shit about actual fairness. Which is honestly why this whole thing is moot for most of us anyway, because it doesn't matter if your shit is closed, open, or ajar - if someone wants to fuck you, they will, and they'll probably get away with it.
The thing is, I want to live in a world where this isn't the case. I'd really like to live in a world where fairness is valued and where there are defenses against bad actors that are accessible to everyone, no matter how much money you have. So when I read Prusa's article I was like "Well shit, this makes a lot of sense and I hope this gets some traction." But I also knew it wouldn't go without some outrage and while I wasn't surprised, I was disappointed to see some voices that I know and like and respect being part of that.
There needs to be room for a license like the one he's trying to implement. This solves so many problems for so many people who are trying to make a living selling a single-purpose piece of hardware. And before you try to wave the Holy Grail of Adafruit in my face - yes of course I'm a fan of their work and also selling hundreds of < $50 devices that people build into other things is an entirely different type of business than one whose predominant source of income is from one dedicated product. Also, and I'm gonna piss more of you off by saying this - a product that is a circuit board is practically software. If you can send one set of files off to one of hundreds of fabs and get an entire product back with a high degree of certainty that it will just work, that is a far simpler scenario than a machine with those things plus a bunch of moving parts that all have to be assembled and work together in the hands of someone who is not you. It's because of these complexities in products and in types of businesses that we need more options for open-source licenses. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to hardware.
I also think it's pretty wild to say that Prusa's proposed license isn't an open source license. They are literally opening their source files to the public. And technically they called it an "Open Community" license and said they were open-sourcing their design under it. But I think the implication is that they shouldn't be using the words "open source" to describe what they're doing at all, and that the Open Community license shouldn't be considered a type of open source license, and that's kind of fucked up. That reeks of gatekeeping, to claim that one extremely narrow and limiting definition of open source is the only one true definition and the only way anyone can ever refer to something as being "open source". It is certainly not an OSHWA license and they're not pretending it is. The entire point is that it's different because the OSHWA license doesn't work for their business. And people THAT IS OK. If you're going to cling to the OSHWA definition as the only or "right" definition, all it does is alienate all of us who are like "I would like to share my designs but I need a little more protection."
Finally, it is accepted and even vehemently defended that artists, musicians, and authors, whose works are de facto inspectable and on display for everyone, have protections against unauthorized copying and selling. That the time they took to develop their creations, to hone their skills, to put that physical object into the world HAS VALUE. Why the hell does that all get thrown out the window when it's a machine that involves technology? Why are my only options not sharing it at all, or just wholesale giving people the right to freely duplicate and sell my design? And why am I bad for choosing to not share so that I can support myself, just like musicians, artists, and authors regularly fight to do? It's just some fucked-up double-think.
Anyway, as I said, none of this actually makes a material difference in my life or in the way I'm going to license or not license things in the near future. And IANAL and have nothing to say about whether or not Prusa's proposed license has legal merit or not. There's that whole "must not be subject to data mining" clause that I don't know how anyone can actually control in this day and age. Isn't anything put up on Github data mined whether you like it or not? Anyway, I would just love to live in a world where this kind of DBAJ license could exist, and could give creators of all means some protection from assholes and trolls. I will give everyone at Prusa who worked on this credit for their time, and for having the eggs to throw something at the wall and see if it sticks.