The license for the HDL is under dual license GPLv2 and a license to
Transversal technology. If someone want to make is own board or re-use
the code he is free to do so for non commercial purpose. If someone want
to use the HDL code for any commercials activity they must talk with
Transversal.
The code under MIT is for the software, BIOS and driver. The reason is
for enabling anyone to develop for any platform CPU/OS, since we just
want people to use the card or the asic in the future.
PcgScrapAddy wrote:
But does the MIT license allow for a built-in revenue stream? My
current understanding is someone, once the project is done and making
boards/chips, could swoop in and grab all your docs/code/etc. and then
produce their own board at a much lower cost and leave you high and
dry. What protections have you factored into the project to handle a
situation such as that?
Under that scenario you have an instant competitor without them having
incurred any cost. If the point is to just get open hardware out there
and damn the ramifications then ok but if you are looking to seal up
deals where your chipset funds ongoing work then you may have a
problem since nvidia and ati will both scoop on that in a heartbeat.
Not trying to be a downer here but you can trust business weenies
about as much as politicians and lawyers so ...
Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
On 2/29/08, PcgScrapAddy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Linux drivers need to be GPL so they can be included in the
mainline
kernel but we are so far away from that I shouldn't even mention
it. The
rest of the stuff needs to be under a MySQL like license in that if
you
are commercial then pay up! I think this is what is being striven
for so
a revenue stream is built-in to support ongoing development.
Am I wrong?
GPL, especially v3, is compatible with MIT in the sense that something
that was under MIT can be combined with GPL code without problems.
There is also room for automatically relicensing MIT code under GPL
because MIT doesn't have any major requirements that are incompatible
with the GPL. Finally, if any situation were to arise where the MIT
license caused a problem for combining with GPL, we would explicitly
relicense it under GPL.
The major reason to have any license at all is legal. If you release
something in to the public domain, you can get sued over it. These
licenses, on the other hand, have protection clauses that state that
if you use it, the authors are not held responsible for any harm you
may suffer through the use of our stuff. Of course, those clauses
don't universally hold up in court, but it's still good CYA.
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