Timothy Miller wrote:
Anyone else have comments on how to deal with this? We're likely to have plenty of situations where the hardware might, if you really strain for it, be considered to be a derived work of GPL code. How can we make sure the business model is safe, while also keeping the work of the community safe as well? We need to do the right thing in all cases.
There are other things that this project could potentially use from the growing amount of cores at opencores.org. For instance, the PCI Bridge looks very good.
The people behind the PCI Bridge project say it best:
Purpose of the PCI Bridge project
FIRST: All commercial PCI soft cores, that we noticed, are PCI interfaces. They have different backend interfaces. A system designer using PCI interface for some application must also be aware of the PCI protocol. With a PCI bridge a designer considers only the system bus (WISHBONE SoC bus) and can easily focus on his application. (It is true, that PCI interfaces occupy less space, but they do not incorporate a back-end)
SECOND: The same code for FPGA prototypes and ASIC end-products. The code is completely GENERIC, which makes it retargetable for any FPGA or ASIC technology.
*******************
THIRD: We believe that the PCI bridge will be better tested and more improved because it is an open source PCI bridge core.
*******************
This third bit is the most interesting. It's the same principle from in the Linux community. It would seem that this project is the perfect kind of project to be supporting this PCI bridge effort.
Like the previous GPL discussions, this raises legal questions that may be unknown at this time.
Jeff
This PCI bridge was developed with help from Uwe Bonnes (VGA crt core) on a 150k gate Spartan II. http://opencores.nnytech.net/projects.cgi/web/pci/
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
