Re: [oc] Inquiry

[<cyrano@nerim.net>]

John Kent <jekent@optushome.com.au> a écrit :

> Hi everyone ...
> 
> Seems like a popular discussion, so I'll wade in with my 2 cents worth.
> 
> Its nice to have the cudos of having your design compete with comercial
> designs, but to do so, you have to accept that people want to make money
> out of it.
> 
> Open Cores and GPL licences seem to me almost like a socialist utopia
> were people do everything for the glory rather than hard cold cash.
> Its tempting to "stick it into" the comercial guys, but hey everyone needs
> to make a living .... Those people who contribute cores (including me)
> need some sort of income to live on, so really Open Cores is subsidised
> by either unemployment benefits or a comercial company or government
> anyway.

What to say about "socialist utopia" ? The first goal of free/open stuff is to have the 4 liberties (of use, of modification, of redistribution, of learning). There is nothing about money. If you don't have this 4 liberties, it  is not open/free stuff at all.

GPL and BSD do the same. But BSD imply that guys play the game. So, one of the side effect of the GPL it is that you can't simply live by selling licence of it. You must find other thing (support, implementing new feature for a client, ...).

> 
> My feeling is that you get what you pay for. If you are serious about a
> comercial design, you should not use Open Cores code. I treat Open Cores

Why IBM are serious by investing 1 Billions dollars in Linux and opencores can't be ?

Many project under sourceforges are not finish but some of them are really usefull. You can't make a global rules.

> as a learning experience to see worked example of how to write VHDL and
> verilog, and for that I've found it very useful.
> 
> I tried adapting a 68K multitasking kernel from Doctor Dobbs Journal
> many years ago for a comercial application. I ended up rewritting it because
> it did not work. 

It's only one experience. The opposite is the days use of linux.

> Free software, or free IP is not free if you have to 
> maintain
> it, 

So you understand, why "free" in free software means free as a speach and not free as a beer....

Free are for freedom to not be attached to one entites which decide what to do, what to sell you, etc...

> and given that the GPL stipulates that modifications be accessible 
> to every one,
> you are giving you work and money away in doing so.
> 

Yes but as usual you don't want to give back the "fees" (the improvement) but you use code from other beside it.

nicO  (Nicolas Boulay)

> John Kent.
> 
> -- 
> http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent



___________________________________
Webmail Nerim, http://www.nerim.net/


--
To unsubscribe from cores mailing list please visit http://www.opencores.org/mailinglists.shtml