The whole idea with a number, is that it's more a general level.
Like I said before (and so far nobody replied to it), now with letters it only suits electronics, which I think is far to limited and completely useless.
With numbers/a scale you can refer to a certain level and therefore it's usable in other fields.
And I am sorry, but science is all about 'first glance'. We all try to put things in numbers that are understandable.
THD, PSSR, CMRR, max load, tolerance, the use of standard deviation, 'RMS' voltage/power, peak voltage/power are all 'first glance numbers'.
Nobody reads the whole document to understand certain conclusions, you first skim over results and numbers to see if it's usable.
That's exactly what this is about. People wanna skim OSHW projects if they are usable.
If I need to go into detail every single little time, no thank you, to much of an hassle!
I seriously don't understand the most inconvenient most time consuming approach.
About copying and changing licenses. Well that's always the risk.
But if you state clearly in your original design that the design can only be used, modified and copied under the same license and may never be transformed into a commercial license (like amspire said), that should be covered.
Yes, people can still infringe that, but that's no different that with patents (which happens all the time btw)
Hexidecimal hashes or anything else are not gonna help in this. It's clear were a design came from.
Ones again, that's no difference than products with a patent.