Think about it this way. Can I take a best selling novel scan it into an electronic file, change the font and then publish it? I don't think so. I also don't think you can verbatum copy someones schematics and re-layout the board without violating the schematics copyright. Anyone who releases a very similar work had better be able to demonstrate that their work is original. Original schematics, failed earlier attempts and lab books would all probably be good evidence.
I think the key here is that if you reverse engineer (an oxy-morron for an open source project) ronja, draw your own schematics, layout your own boards, right your own code (software and programable logic) then you are in the clear. Make sure you document everything. Remember the efforts in the early days of the PC to make legal versions of the bios. Software clean rooms etc. Because, Karel has made his work available to the public (even more so then IBM did in one of the original pc technical manual where they published the BIOS source code). Inorder to make a clean non-free version of Ronja, you would have to have one group go through ronja and maticulously document design specifications and requirements. Then use a second non-contaminated team to design to meet the specifications. Again document each step of the effort. Otherwise Karel might have a good chance to shut your efforts down. Steve Meier On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 14:33 -0500, DJ Delorie wrote: > > I think the printed circuit board itself can have a copyright. > > Yeah, that's the tricky question. The board *as made* may be > copyright-protected, but the *circuit* on the board may not be. So, > if you take Ronja's schematics and do your own layout, the resulting > board may not be illegal, but copying Ronja's board may be. > > Assuming Ronja's license prohibits it ;-) > > > _______________________________________________ > geda-user mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
