> At least one of the PCB developers clearly stated that his PCB > landpatterns were not covered by the GPL.
The general consensus on gedasymbols.org at least, is that symbols and footprints are GPLd *until you use them*. Once embedded, they become "unlimited use". It's a complicated issue, like fonts, and like fonts, we're trying to prevent someone from taking the geda libraries and producing proprietary libraries for other EDA systems, but not trying to stop you from using the libraries to produce products. I wish there were a better way to document and enforce this desire, but the use of ASCII formats makes it very easy to extract symbols and footprints from a working project (heck, pcb gives you a menu entry that does it). On gedasymbols.org we've adopted a dual-tag license scheme; you can assign one license to distribution and a different one to use. I don't see how symbols' license can apply to a built board, since there's no trace (sic) of the symbol remaining once the board is built. And even footprints are only barely represented once the board is fab'd and populated. And given that the part specs tell us what a footprint is supposed to look like, I don't think there's anything copyrightable left of a footprint after fab. At least, that's my opinion, and my gedasymbols files are tagged "unlimited use". _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
