On Wednesday 23 February 2005 23:33, Timothy Miller wrote: > There is an issue that has to be addressed regarding the time when the > RTL for any given product is released. Being able to EOL a product is > necessary for business, but the spirit of the project is to never > leave the users behind, and the best solution is to release the RTL at > EOL (if not before). > > The issue to be addressed is IP licensees. Those are people who buy > rights to use the IP in their own chips (as opposed to buying our > chips). These people would pay real money for this. As soon as the > RTL is released, I don't want them to feel as though the "value add" > in paying for that IP has been lost.
What kind of IP are we talking about here? IP is an awfully vague term. I don't see trademarks being relevant, and I don't think anything is cutting-edge enough to get a patent (unless it's a software patent of course, then anything goes). That leaves trade secrets (which I know pretty much nothing about) and copyright (which we're all familiar with I guess). Considering copyright, John Carmack of id software has been publishing his old Quake engines under the GPL at Christmas for a while now. Last time, the Quake III engine was in line, but it was not released under the GPL, for the reasons you mention. It had recently been bought by someone for a game, and they did not want to give it away, even under the GPL, shortly afterwards. I think it's certainly a valid concern. These are your customers after all. On the other hand, GPL is GPL. They'd be paying for the right to use it in proprietary applications. If they don't want to, they can get it under the GPL, but then they'd have to open up the rest of their specs as well. That probably wouldn't happen anyway, so they'd still have to pay you royalties. And everyone else could hack their FPGA-based boards. > Another item to be considered is military applications. Military > users may not appreciate the idea that some part of their ultra-secret > device will become public knowledge at some point in the future. > Naturally, the licensing agreement would stipulate that the licensee > has no rights to add restrictions to our use of our IP, but there is a > valid concern. One solution is for the licensee to pay an NRE to us > to develop a custom variant of the IP where register numbers are > obfuscated and other features are changed so that vulnerabilities in > our IP would not be the same as the ones in their custom version. Do you have a security clearance? Work in a top-secret facility with a fencepost and a guard? What guarantee do they have that you are trustworthy? Or that it is impossible for someone to enter the building and steal the documents? Even if you don't release them there is still a risk. If it's really top secret then they probably won't want to take it anyway. > An important factor in all of this is to realize that, in some cases, > there can be no absolute EOL. If a customer wants 20 years of support > and replacement parts, and the company lasts 20 years, we're going to > have to provide those things. Although we may decide to stop selling > a particular product on the open market, that doesn't necessarily make > the product completely dead. We need to carefully arrange things so > that we can release the RTL _AND_ be able to properly support > commercial customers. Yeah. And you should probably tell them beforehand that you plan to open up the RTL later, just as a matter of courtesy. Lourens _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
