Growing Pains! Argh! (Terms of Service Clarifications)

6/13/2013 0 Comments

Ugh, the legal stuff...

Since the rollout of the second generation CircuitHub site and infrastructure, we've been growing almost twice as fast as before.

With this growth have come questions from users, and concerns from our legal team.

So to end all the confusion, we're updating our Terms of Service, Acceptable Use, and Privacy policies to more precisely define the kinematics in play.

It's simple really:


  • CircuitHub exists to make electronics easier by, among other things, letting you share and consume design information. If you participate, you are giving CircuitHub permission to let others consume and derive from your contributions.
  • If, in the future, we offer features that let you keep some of your data private, you are giving CircuitHub all the permission it needs to store and maintain that information on your behalf.
  • We won't share your private design or personal information publicly without your permission, but if you elect to share things publicly you are giving CircuitHub permission to let others consume and derive from your contributions.

Obviously, this is just a summary. For the full terms, see our legal page.

Because it's our mission!

We want to be very clear, and on-record, about this:

CircuitHub was conceived by Andrew and myself, to make it easier to design, fabricate, and share electronic innovations.

The universal parts library will always be free to use.

We created our policies after studying like-minded companies, GitHub and Dropbox, whom we feel face similar issues -- managing liability while fostering openness and sharing under your specific direction.

We have a strong tradition of supporting openness in both the tens of released open-source software projects (and the financial support we give to many more) and the support we give to the open-hardware movement.

If you have an open-hardware project that aspires to do good for the world, let us know. We could hook you up with free engineering, manufacturing, and promotional support!