On 8/23/05, Jack Carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 09:27:58PM -0500, Patrick McNamara wrote: > > I think we need an Open Source Hardware license ... > > As much as I hate to see OGP and Traversal burdened by another > complicated and ill-defined task, I believe you're right. FSF might > consider this issue important enough to help us figure out what to do. > > Besides the design goals you listed for the license, I'd add at > least one more. > It must permit source code received under the "Hardware Library > General Public License" to be combined with source code under other > licenses, or under trade secret protection, to be compiled and linked into a > hardware product and distributed, without incurring an obligation to place > that other source code under "HLGPL". Without that, most chip makers will > have to consider open source hardware code unavailable to their businesses. > I'd base the distinction between a derivative work and a compilation > on whether or not the open-source file is modified. If it is, there must be > a bona fide offer to supply the modified source code to whoever receives the > implementation (in either soft or hard form). But all source code files > that do not contain any code received under an open-source license are free > from any obligations applicable to derivative works. That point should be > expressed in crystal-clear language. > If a chip maker wanted to create a new function that needed to > interact with existing open-source code, they should be able to protect > their proprietary design by segregating as much of it as possible into a > closed-source file, then modify the open-source file to provide the > necessary hooks for the closed-source portion to connect to. They would be > required to apply the open-source license to the modified file with the > hooks, but not to their own file containing the actual functionality. I > believe the Linux kernel project had a discussion about hooks, and decided > to permit this.
We should get this worked out, but I don't think it's quite so urgent. We need simple statements that gives Traversal full rights. As it was mentioned before, we don't have customers if they're bound by open source licensing. We need to be able to license this IP in various forms to companies that want to do things to it; they pay an up-front fee and a per-unit fee, and out of that, they get to hack up the Verilog code all they want without having to publish it. This is all intended to give Traversal an advantage over other vendors with more money. Traversal has NO money right now. All expendatures are paid for by me and my partners (and kind people who have donated time, web resources, etc.). However, in the spirit of open source, we want to publish the source to our design. Even in that case, we want to give Traversal an advantage. Using a license like the GPL means that people who want to use the IP either have to give back to the community, or they have to pay money to Traversal to get it under different terms. We're not greedy, and I don't expect to get rich from this. But no one's going to invest in my company if they don't see all sorts of protections in place. Free Software means that you can get the source code. You're assured of getting that. But Free Software doesn't mean zero-cost. The cost to you is either money or the requirement to publish all your changes. Unless someone has a good reason otherwise, I'm going to flesh out the wording and slap the dual license on the PCI stuff that's in the repository (dual LGPL), and the same for the model (dual GPL). _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
