On 12 Nov 2007, at 01:34, Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
So you're going to have some IP you develop yourself, such as your PCB
design. If you have an organization of your own, you might consider
some kind of dual-licensing scheme of your own. Or not. Mostly I'm
interested in dealing with what goes inside of the FPGA and the
friendly cooperation we can engage in.
Things get a little muddy when you consider how you might combine code
you've developed with ours. Naturally, any _combined_ work should
either be GPL or some other license arrangement that we agree upon.
But when it comes to your own Verilog code (or anything else), well,
it's yours. You may choose to commit to the OGP or not. Use your
judgement and your own sense of ethics. You are not _required_ to
commit your work to us under the dual license, but you should consider
honoring our _request_ that you do so. You should weigh your benefit
from our work and decide if that's great enough that we should benefit
from yours. Because we're asking to be able to commercialize what you
contribute, it may seem a little one-sided, but this is designed in to
our grand plan to be able to actually build and sell real hardware and
get it into many people's hands. Besides, 90% of the code you need is
already there.
This really started as a "We just start with VGA and we'll see what
happens" and right now a lot of things are already happening, even
though we haven't even started working on the actual VGA
implementation. So talking about how pVGA's code can help OGP sounds
very, uhm, mind boggling.
I'm sure we can work something out when the time comes.
It's a dual license that explicitly states that you can use the work
under the terms of the GPL. You may or may not be allowed to use
OGP-related trademarks, depending on various circumstances, but the
code is out there to be used under GPL. That means that you can do
whatever you want with it and build commercial products from it, as
long as you release the source code (in some way) along with your
product. That is, if you use our PCI controller under GPL, then your
only requirement (from the GPL) is that you make it possible for the
user of your device to acquire the source code to that and anything
it's linked to.
The only unusual bit is that if you want to participate in the OGP and
be considered a "contributing member," then you should commit
additions to our SVN repository (well, that's one of the ways). That
does not in any way change YOUR rights. But it does allow Traversal
to commercialize your work in a way that does not bind it under the
GPL.
Traversal was created for two purposes. One is to productize OGP
developments. Since they're hardware, they require expendatures, and
to make those expendatures, we need to be able to make profit. The
second is as an interface to the "old school" corporate world. For
the latter, we do things like use licensing deals in order to make
more profit that we can invest into developing more open hardware.
When you work with us, consider how you want your work to be turned
into hardware. None of this is about PERSONAL profit. It's about
bootstrapping a community to build hardware, which is expensive.
(Although in fairness, others have pointed out that Andy, Howard, and
I should be able to get something back from the money we've spent and
the stress this has put on our families.)
Long story short, will I be able to use stuff from SVN with just a
GPL license slapped on it instead of the dual license?
Yes.
Brilliant, that clears it up a lot. But it might be wise for future
reference to clarify this somehow. I also understand the whole
ethical balance of how much profit you can put in your own pockets, I
just want to make clear that I'm not doing this for purely personal
gain either. That doesn't mean however I'm not having any costs at
the moment, and I do hope it pays of at some point in the future.
This is also why I'm reluctant to just give Traversal commercial
rights, even if I have your word that you wouldn't run with it.
Now, let's talk again about specifics here. You want to develop a
VGA-only graphics board and sell it. I'm not worried about your board
license. I think it would be just dandy if you were to use our code
to make your board work. You sell your board, you make your profit,
and you decide if you want to donate some of that money to the OHF.
In exchange, the OGP will get bug fixes and other important additions
that we can incorporate into our open graphics products. Everybody's
happy.
A bit offtopic, but is it actually possible to donate to OHF nowadays?
--
Timothy Normand Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
Open Graphics Project
Mike
www.wacco.mveas.com - Project VGA
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