On 7/11/06, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Now, going out on a limb and at risk of being called a troll: from
> *my* point of view, Traversal is welcome to require very expensive
> licenses/very constrictive NDA's in order to use/view the RTL code,
> *provided* *that* they make a covenant with the community to always
> release*full* interface & behavioural data & specifications for the
> hardware[1].

I agree. I think it should mainly be a business decision by Traversal.
How much revenue does TT miss when opening up the RTL versus how much
does TT gain from having outside developers helping out. That's hard to
say, and it will probably change over time as well.

One of the real experiments is going to be to see if OGA1's release
results in much change by the community.  If there's much enhancement,
we might find it worth-while to fab a 1.x revision based on that.  But
more likely, people will be preoccupied by the design of OGA2.

A similar experiment will happen sooner with OGD1.  We need libraries
of logic blocks built up around that.  SPI is done, video is
essentially done, I'll be doing a memory controller, PCI is 80% there,
etc.  But people will want more blocks.  If the community can help
work on these pieces, it'll show the kind of give and take that will
go on in the future.  OGD1 is a totally open project from the
beginning, so this will be very telling.  [It's also therefore vital
for the OHF to get donations so we can get OGD1 boards into the hands
of the developers.]

One thing we should have in mind for the Ohio LinuxFest is seeing if
we can get the hardware (which will exist at that point) doing
something that people can see.  Even if PCI isn't done, for instance,
we can still have some video test pattern or something that we can
connect to the projector in the auditorium.

Hell, what would be REALLY cool is to have an unaccelerated engine
working that we can run X11 on and use that for the presentation.
Just hook up PCI and the video contoller to the memory controller and
go.  The slowness (if any is observed) will be "proof" that we're
really using this hardware.
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