On 10/21/07, Josephblack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 21/10/2007, howard parkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > First problem: not all data sheets are available online, > > > > namely for the SIL1178 and CX25874 are hidden somewhere. > > > > I have these. I not sure if I should allow them to be downloaded > > by everyone though. While these data sheets were free and downloadable > > from the manufacturer at some point in the past, this is no longer > > the case, and I wonder if its worth upsetting SI/Conexant by > > posting these. > > Has anyone actually asked SI/Conexant whether they mind if we post > these for our members and prospective customers? If they are hesitant, > I guess we could rename the the filenames (?) and with the wiki we may > be able to set up a page that is invisible for non members. > > I have been wondering if they will say "no problem.."
This mailing list is publicly readable. If we were going to do this before, we definitely can't now, because if someone wanted to procecute us for copyright violation, they could use these public records as evidence that we knew it was at least questionable and decided to do it anyhow. Whatever we do, we have to do it carefully and with full permission from the copyright holder. If, in the end, they decide that we cannot share the datasheet, we have a couple of options. One is to not populate the chip and implement an alternative. Hypothetically, we could do all of the modulation for a composite TV signals in the digital domain in the FPGA and send it through the VGA DAC. Another option is to extract the essential facts from the material we have and publish our own documentation. This is perfectly legal, because you cannot copyright facts, we would have acquired the chips themselves through legal means, and since the datasheets were once publically published, they can't expect to remove every copy of the document that people had downloaded before they took it down or prevent people from talking about it. In short, we could have a wiki page on it with all the info one needs to use it. Note that if we were to design FPGA logic to do a TV signal encoding, the amount of logic is small enough that we could productize it as an ASIC and sell it in volume. I founded the OGP on the idea of replacing the major graphics vendors, rather than bullying them into giving us docs. If Connexant doesn't want to play nice, we can just replace them. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
