On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 18:53 -0400, Daniel Phillips wrote: > Hi Timothy, > > [ snip ] > > Just for the record: I'm really pleased to hear this, and it could very > well help land some project financing. When the GPL RTL is available, > we can also expect to see a number of experienced hardware hackers join > the project.
I don't know where you got your naivete from and I don't know what open source projects you have participated in, but my experience is (and I have confirmed than in a couple of places like gnome or enlightenment) that after a project is open sourced, the following will happen. A rush of inexperienced 15-year old will come and want to help. They won't know any OpenGL or Verilog for that matter and if they do happen to know some of it, they are going to produce non-synthesizable Verilog code or simply copy it from some Verilog tutorial somewhere. Of course, if a project is famous, there'll also be the occasional good hardware hacker. I have no doubt that there will be plenty of people falling over each other feet trying to write a kernel driver for it, but I seriously doubt that there will be "a number of experienced hardware hackers" joining soon. From what I've seen on this mailing list, there were only few (2-3) people who claimed that they know any Verilog at all. I never hoped more to be mistaken. Please prove me wrong. Another thing: Opening the Verilog to a "select" number of people is a chicken-and-egg problem (if the code is supposed to be closed). You only want to give it to people who are likely to contribute, but you only know after they contributed which they can only do if they have the code. Of course, you might look at the people who are contributing documentation or software (or both), but then again, is it likely that these are "experienced hardware hackers"? I doubt it. Not that I wouldn't be interested to get my hands dirty. I do know some VHDL but I'm far from experienced (Quote Eric Smith: "enough [...] to be dangerous"). Furthermore since I'm not from the US, an NDA might be a completely worthless piece of paper (Disclaimer: IANAL). > Regards, > > Daniel Cheers, -- Ulf
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