Re: [oc] ask slashdot?

[Ruben Leote Mendes <etruben@ua.pt>]

Hello,

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 11:04:37AM +0800, McMeikan, Andrew wrote:
> I think its a very complex issue, one I have been thinking about for some
> time and while the GPL seems to suit it in spirit I don't think its a good
> idea in practice.  The LGPL comes closer.

I agree with you. The LGPL license is somewhere between the GPL and BSD
licenses. I think it would be bad to create divisions among the few opencores
developers because of licensing issues. I hope an LGPL style license is 
tolerated by all for now. 

> The hassle is that this is HARDWARE not SOFTWARE, while we could protect a
> HDL description it could still be re-expressed in a way that defeats this.

I don't see why is it different with hardware than with software. If I want
I can take a look in (for instance) the linux kernel code, study it's workings 
and write my own proprietary version. There is nothing we can do about it
whether it is software or hardware. 

> In fact it could be transcribed into hardware and protected by a large
> company that then denies anyone else's use (of that hardware
> implementation).

The way I see it the transcription to hardware is a derived work from the
HDL code in the same way that executable programs are derived from the 
source code and so are protected by the same license.

> Note: I am not a lawyer!

I am also not a lawyer.

-- 
Ruben Leote Mendes - etruben@ua.pt