Re: gEDA-user: PCB footprint mapping

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

Wow!  Dan, you have certainly given an impressive display of
encyclopedic thinking.  You've hit on everything!  The hallmark
of a great engineer!

One little tiny minor point from me: 

> = A copyright policy.  Some considerations:
> 
>    - ability to order proprietary boards, this shouldn't be a problem
> 
>    - what about selling a proprietary layout?  pcb embeds the footprint
> in the .pcb file so can I offer a .pcb file for sale to someone if the
> footprints are GPL?  Probably not.
> 
>    - desire to promote free footprint libraries to work with our free
> layout tool

To this I would add:

   - To make any copyright policy possible, footprints need to enable
comments, and the comments need to be preserved when the footprints
are written into the .pcb file.  That way, you can write the copyright
license directly into the footprint, and have it propagate through the
.pcb file.

BTW:  Marvin Dickens is right (IMHO) -- footprints are similar to the
GNU font exception.  Here's what the GNU language would look like for
footprints (as copied from the GNU page linked by Marvin):

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this footprint,
and embed this footprint or unaltered portions of this footprint into the
document, this footprint does not by itself cause the resulting document to
be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not
however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered
by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this footprint, you may
extend this exception to your version of the footprint, but you are not
obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception
statement from your version.

The same desire for embeddable comments extends to .sch symbols also.

Stuart