On 1/14/07, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm not sure about whether we want a copyleft in there. If it is allowed to take a Free Design Hardware chip and put it onto a proprietary board, then I don't really see the harm in taking the documentation of that chip and making it part of the (proprietary) documentation for the board, because the whole thing would be appropriated anyway. On the other hand, there's no need to do that, they could just publish the (possibly modified) open documentation under the original licence along with their own proprietary docs, and refer to it in the secret stuff.
I can't even really decide what rights I want to give, so this is a hard problem. I always have this nagging concern that someone's going to abuse it in some way that screws us all over. The thing about this video controller, though, is that it's really retro. Once memory sizes and speeds got to the point that we could just do everything as a bitmap display, we lost the need to do any of the clever tricks employed in hardware with display lists and rendering text in the video output. Now, I've gone and designed a video controller that is display-list oriented at the level of every four pixels. And all that, just to future-proof it against any video mode I don't want to have to think about right now. At the same time, there are limitations. For instance, the template that Patrick designed, that works brilliantly for most video modes, won't work properly for LCD "reduced blanking" modes. We can justify hoisting the extra complexity on the driver by making the driver Free Software, so all you gotta do is copy our code. Anyhow, while I think the video controller design is really interesting, it's also not so creative that I should get upset if someone copies it. :) Now, it IS different enough from past approaches that it may be patentable. We and the OHF should look into that. For those interested in Free Software, patents are good for covering your ass against the enemies of Free Software. -- Timothy Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
