On 3/4/06, Nicolas Boulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Le samedi 4 Mars 2006 15:36, J.O. Aho a écrit : > > Far from any expert in the filed, but I think making a driver would be the > > same as linking a program against a gpl library, the license would taint > > the code, which would prevent the closed source driver. There would be a > > need of a LGPL to allow closed source drivers. > > No it's not. The card is hardware. The GPL is a licence which is based on > copyright. Hardware are not manage by copyright law.
Precedent has been set for copyright law applying to chips. I don't remember the details, but: Company A produced a chip. Company B used a microscope and figured out how to copy it. Company A used a microscope to look at company B's chip and discovered that it was a copy. Company A sued company B in court and won. > GPL/LGPL is often used for opencores (even by the European Space Agency) but > it's hard to find an IP lawyer that's said how you could defined "a > derivative form of work" inside hardware design. Synthesis from RTL to hardware is, by its nature, a mechanical translation process. It seems to me that this is an obvious case of "derivative work." If we don't have the necessary protections here to prevent unethical copying of our design, we're in trouble. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
