Great news! Was it complicated and/or difficult getting this? Anything we should collectively learn from your interactions with GitLab @briannaljohns?
I have done the GitLab OSS program for projects before. They are pretty flexible and there is a human in the loop. This means that you can explain things, such as that seeing as we have a hardware project our license is not OSI approved, but it is OSHWA approved.
The annoying thing is that you have to do the renewal manually each year by emailing a person. However, they are working on automating the renewal process, or at least taking humans out of the loop.
Worth noting that there is an academic program as well as the open source one. Our group use this for both our non-OpenFlexure/GitBuilding projects, but also we do have some private repositories for things like grant writing.
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Julian, are you talking about a specific project? I see the OpenFlexure design files are under CERN OHL v1.2. which indeed is not approved by OSI, but all three variants of CERN OHL v2 are.
I have had it in my todo list to include CERN OHL v2 in the list at https://choosealicense.com/, from which I believe github.com and gitlab.com generate their drop-down menus to chose a license when you create a project. The instructions to add a license to the list involve a bit of scripting or advanced github/gitlab search to prove the licenses are already being broadly used (at least in 1,000 public repositories) and this bit has made it non-trivial for me so far, but I hope to find time to go through the process this summer. If anybody would like to help, let me know!
Cheers,
Javier
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@Javier I’ve been dreaming about having the CERN OHL licenses in https://choosealicense.com, how can I help? Should we start a thread specifically about this?
@Javier
Great to know v2 is OSI approved. I think I had this specific conversation with GitLab probably 3-4 years ago. So it was probably even before v2 was released. But good to know it is now OSI approved.
@hpy It would be good to push forward with this, I am not sure how best to approach choosealicense, I did start this thread in the past which was about an issue I raised trying to get GitLab directly to add open hardware licenses.
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Thanks @hpy @julianstirling. I believe github.com derives their list from choosealicense.com. See this and this. And it looks like gitlab.com uses the same source for their license templates. See here.
So being accepted by choosealicense.com seems to be a prerequisite to be listed in github.com and gitlab.com. The instructions to be included in the choosealicense.com list seem quite straight-forward. Once you are sure to fulfil all conditions, you initiate a pull request. We currently can easily tick all boxes except the proof for being used in more than 1,000 public repositories. If any of you has the required skills and time to work on that, and also to open the pull request, I would be super grateful. An example for a github search is given in the instructions. I would of course make myself available to discuss in the pull request thread and answer any questions which may arise.
Cheers,
Javier
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Seems there are over 1k spread across the 4 versions of the license. I know a lot of the hardware community is on GitLab but the search seems less functional.
I think it is slightly less standard how hardware projects do their license files as well. I have had a number of projects where we have hardware and software in the same repo so we need two licenses.
I am happy to open a PR with the three v2 licenses, we can then make the case that it makes sense to include all three variants. Open Hardware is becoming known and this is the key license, I think it is time to start the conversation.
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Excellent! Here are the links to the three text files for the license texts:
https://ohwr.org/cern_ohl_s_v2.txt
https://ohwr.org/cern_ohl_w_v2.txt
https://ohwr.org/cern_ohl_p_v2.txt
And here are the SPDX pages, with their SPDX identifiers:
https://spdx.org/licenses/CERN-OHL-S-2.0.html
https://spdx.org/licenses/CERN-OHL-W-2.0.html
https://spdx.org/licenses/CERN-OHL-P-2.0.html
I agree that some things are better discussed and explained in the thread for the PR. Please post a link when you have it and let’s continue there.
Thanks!
Javier
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Looking forward to it. Let me/us know if there’s additional ways to help other than @julianstirling’s pull request. 
Haha OK, that I can do.
Hi @julianstirling, as you requested I’m responding to this thread to check on the status of the pull request.
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Thank you, status is “did not percolate to top of todo list, nor was achieved as procrastination from those items at the top of todo list”.
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Haha fair enough, story of my life…
It turned out to be more work than expected as we needed examples and we needed some automatic tests to pass. Divided work between @Javier and myself, and someone we don’t know had already got us started. In true open source fashion we built on their start, and had a helpful conversation with the maintainer.
The pull request is not yet merged, but the automatic tests are passing!
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The pull request is merged! There is now a hardware section on choosealicense.com! We have arrived!
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Thank you @julianstirling! 
While GitHub is not my preferred platform for many reasons, this is clearly a historic step in the promotion of open source hardware. 
Thanks @julianstirling! Now my guess is at some point we should see the CERN OHL v2 variants pop up in the drop down menus when you want to select a licence for a new project in github.com, gitlab.com or any instance of GitLab and also when you create a new file called LICENSE or similar. I checked and did not see this yet. Does anybody know more about this? Otherwise I will try to contact somebody at GitHub.
Cheers,
Javier
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I think it is worth contacting as I don’t know exactly how it works. Also worth trying GitLab as CERN is a customer?
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Don’t know if it’s related, but FYI I saw that the licensee tool has added support for the CERN-OHL-P/W/S-2.0 licenses in its latest 9.15.3 release. I think this is the tool GitHub uses for license detection, so maybe doesn’t directly affect GitLab…