Hi Cory and all, Please don't take the following (and the previous mails) as an offence, it's not intended to.
I'am really glad that there is such a community as the gEDA community, and that they are able to create and share an Open Software EDA suite with such great quality. I try to contribute wherever/whenever possible. I have several thoughts on this matter I like to share with you all. We could think of all kind of scenarios, wanted or unwanted, but is it going to help, does it change anything by itself ? IMHO I would leave the legal hair splitting to lawyers. Users and developers should do what they do best, using and developing ;-) Best option to me is that somebody asks a lawyer (the lawyer involved preferably has just finished law school as to avoid too expensive labour costs) to look into this matter and split the hairs for us. When in doubt leave the choice for a license to the creator of the footprint/symbol (with attributes as in the scheme described on gedasymbols.org). The latter would require some more license texts on gedasymbols.org to be able to make an educated guess (after all we're not lawyers, so what does all the words mean --> language barrier for peoples with a non English/US-English native tongue). And then there is the matter of local laws; in some parts of the world reverse engineering is allowed by local law, in some countries it's not. If and when symbols/footprints are to be used for commercial purposes (unwanted scenario ?) would "we" be told by the offender, I think not. And a final thought: who is going to do any legal work if "we" choose to disagree with the unwanted scenario and want the unwanted scenario to be resolved/reversed with regard to the offender ? Just my EUR 0.02 Kind regards, Bert Timmerman. BTW: Some day I really have to add up all those EUR 0.02's and make a real donation, allowing some lawyer to do the hair splitting for you guys ;-) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Cory Cross Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 4:37 AM To: gEDA developer mailing list Subject: Re: gEDA-dev: Revised symbol license text Timmerman, Bert wrote: > Hi all, > > If "we" indeed were to develop the greatest library in the world ... > > Well, let us get there first, and then wounder if achieving all this did > go unnoticed by the big commercial EDA companies. My point, which was not explained as well as it could have been, was if the scenarios are not undesirable, there's no reason to place the footprints under anything more restrictive than a BSD license. I'd like to place all my footprints and symbols under the same license as gEDA, so I hope this issue gets worked out, but it won't be if the community (us) doesn't even know what we want to allow and disallow. Cory Cross _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
