On 10/5/06, Hamish Marson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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Timothy Miller wrote:
> Just to toss in a few thoughts I have specifically about OGA,
> TRV10, etc.
>
>
[deleted]
>
> If a TRV10 chip were placed on a board with other components that
> are not defined as part of OGA, they should not be affected by the
> GPL. That is mere aggregation.
>
The equivalent therefore of runtime linking of shared object libraries?
Yes, but only in the sense of having that linking being of an optional
plugin rather than a required component. Perhaps it's an
application/platform division, with TRV10 being the platform. TRV10
is somewhat useless without memory chips, but you can choose any
conformant memory chips. It's like using Win32 codecs with Xine.
Xine is under GPL (I'm assuming), but the optional plugins are not.
And Xine is useless without codecs.
> The OGC1 PCB is a design that is copyrightable. But that copyright
> does not spread to the components on it. If someone were to
> fabricate OGC1 or OGD1 or whatever PCB and release any mods they
> made, that would be legal, as long as they conform to the license.
> This is irrespective of what they put on the board. If they copy
> TRV10, that's okay too, as long as the licensing is respected.
The equivalent in the HW world for static linking therefore (Which
AIUI requires GPL releasing) would be to take the OGA, TRV10 etc
definition & create a new chip or chipset that extends it's
functionality, and is unable to be separated out from it by an
end-user... (Even if the end-user has a soldering iron & wire cutters).
Exactly. Being able to desolder it makes the GPL requirement weaker or null.
There's something I'd like to prevent, but which may be hard to
prevent. Someone could buy an OGD1 board and resell it all they like.
Fine. Someone could buy an OGD1 board and completely reprogram it
and resell it as a proprietary product. Fine. But I don't want
someone leaving the PCI controller on the XP10 intact, reprogramming
the S34000, and then selling it as proprietary product. In that case,
I want them to release the source to their design or pay a licensing
fee for the use of that PCI controller.
The desoldering requirement is met. You can physically remove either
FPGA. But I want to declare the two FPGAs as being effectively one
device and that whatever's in one is license-bound by what's in the
other. Or in other words, what is in one chip is not merely
aggregated with what's in the other chip, simply by virtue of the
licensing of the PCI controller and the rest of OGA.
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