RE: [oc] ask slashdot?

["McMeikan, Andrew" <andrew.mcmeikan@mitswa.com.au>]

I think its a very complex issue, one I have been thinking about for some
time and while the GPL seems to suit it in spirit I don't think its a good
idea in practice.  The LGPL comes closer.

What is needed is a way to make sure the 'community' receives the benefit of
its intellectual property being used.

	1) The ability to sell for money - we need to eat.
	2) Build it into closed designs and sell it (like the LGPL allows),
to protect other IP that is not open
	3) Ensures that improvement of the communities IP makes it back into
the community (the point of the GPL)

The hassle is that this is HARDWARE not SOFTWARE, while we could protect a
HDL description it could still be re-expressed in a way that defeats this.
In fact it could be transcribed into hardware and protected by a large
company that then denies anyone else's use (of that hardware
implementation).

While slashdotters wrestle with this issue from time to time (even
recently), its the IP lawyers opinions that we need.  

Note: I am not a lawyer!

For now I think the best thing is to request that any improvements are made
available to the rest of us.  How to put that in legalese is the tough bit.
Unless laws change it may not be possible to do better than public domain.

	cya,	Andrew...

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Stackelhouse, Scott (FL51) [SMTP:scott.stackelhouse@honeywell.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, March 09, 2000 5:13 AM
> To:	cores@opencores.org
> Cc:	usb@opencores.org
> Subject:	[oc] ask slashdot?
> 
> 
> I'd like to "ask slashdot" what people think about GPL style licensing
> issues regarding synthesizable software such as VHDL, and Verilog HDL.
> 
> What say the opencores crew?
> 
> --Scott
>