On 11/11/07, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The signature on the schematic, BTW, is Michael Meeuwisse. We know him > from the recent discussion on documentation. :-) And "Project VGA" has > been mentioned on this list before, IIRC.
Ah, ok. I didn't read far enough in to notice. :) > Ironically, for a project motivated largely by impatience with OGP, > though, it appears OGP will beat them to market on an FPGA-based card. :-) > > Note that their concept is more of a simple framebuffer VGA card, not a > 3D accelerated card. As some of the comments have noted, there is less > motivation for this, since "any old VGA card" will work with free > drivers just fine. But personally, I don't think that lessens the > interest in creating an Open Hardware version of "any old VGA card". Well, in any case, they should be encouraged to use the code we're developed here, as long as they're willing to share with us their adaptations and enhancements. In particular, I strongly discourage forking unless the differences are too massive. For instance, we're targetting an XP10 for some of the same components (PCI, HQ) that they're going to put in a small Spartan. For simple differences, Verilog has an ifdef directive. For more complex things, differences should be abstracted away by modules that have different drop-ins for different target devices. The VGA implementation is weighing heavily on us. If their goal is to only do VGA, perhaps they can be encouraged to do it "our way." They can use our stuff, speeding them up, and we can use their stuff, speeding us up. Cooperation at its finest. > Technically, of course, they are not an "Open Hardware" project yet, > because they are using CC-NC-SA-3.0" which is a non-free license. But I don't know anything about it. While I encourage Free licenses (copyleft and not), as long as that pertains only to their PCB, I don't really care. That is, if they use our Verilog code, it should be combined only with other Verilog code that has a compatible license (to the greatest extent possible). (Alternatively, they can pay to license it under other terms.) However, which device or PCB they target it at is immaterial. As long as the ideas aren't "locked up" in such a way that the user can't get the source code or alter how it's implemented in the device, I don't poke my nose in any further. (Part of my lack of concern stems from the fact that I want their help, so I'm willing to be flexible. Another part is from the fact that I suspect others will talk them into changing their license without any effort on my part.) -- 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)
