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gEDA-user: Re: Free ECB_AT91 actually isn't free
On 3/19/07, Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://wiki.emqbit.com/free-ecb-at91
Hi Karel (you forgot to say hello).
The licence is GPL and you are stating that the design is free,
but it actually isn't. If anyone takes these files and distributes
them further, he is violating the GPL, because GPL says that he has
to give sources with them. But he can't even have them because the
sources don't seem to be actually published. AFAIK from GPL point of view,
source must be in a format that is the optimum one for editing.
I think that saying that the board is not free, is a bold claim. We know of
people who are trying to assemble the board. Now if we _did_ choose the
GPL, we should have put the "true holy sources online", and you have a point
here.
We just released the sources of the version 1.6. We replaced the PHY,
that was discontinued. We checked the design and we will try it
really soon (PCBs are on their way).
http://svn.arhuaco.org/svn/src/emqbit/free-ecb-at91/
In this case it's definitely not the Gerber. The
actual sources is probably a file for Eagle or Orcad (neither of them being
free software), judging by the graphical appearance of the schematics.
We used Orcad. We would welcome any porting effort to a free tool.
I wonder why you didn't design it in gEDA. I am using gEDA for Ronja design and
Darrel Harmon (did you actually copy anything from his design?) designed also
in gEDA.
Carlos used the Reference Design from Atmel. And the Darrel design was
a great source of inspiration and even support. Also, on the software side,
now that you talk about the GPL, we'd like you to know that
we did show the board to Richard Stallman when he came to Bogotá last
year and he was concerned whether it had a free BIOS or not. Fortunately,
we have an slightly improved version of the Darrell's loader online.
http://svn.arhuaco.org/svn/src/emqbit/ECB_AT91_V2/darrell-loader/Changelog
We don't have much free time in our hands. Carlos worked for free in
this project and he is more productive with Orcad.
Last year I thought Buildroot was better than OpenEmbedded, and Stefano,
an Italian Engineer did show us otherwise by porting OE to the board. In the
same spirit, If someone had the time to port the design to gEDA, we would
love to publish it in our site and even use it for future projects.
I think it's important to have a free tool for edition but are working on
a lot of things now so we cannot do it ourselves this time.
But talking about correctness, I think we fully honor the GPL now.
I also wonder what you are trying to achieve with publishing only the gerbers
and not the sources. If someone wants to manufacture the design in quantities,
sell cheaper and decrease your sales, then it's easy for him as he has the
gerbers. If someone wants to actually be creative and change the design, he
cannot.
You're right here. I hope the design if useful for someone. I'd love to
see it ported to gEDA.
We are working a lot to improve the documentaton in our site, and
any help is more than welcome. I am not a hardware guy, so I work on the
software side. The last thing we did is get 2.6.20 to work in the board.
Now we need to send a lot of patches uptstream.
Regards,
Nelson.-
BTW: We like the gEDA project. I was already in this mailing list.
--
http://arhuaco.org
http://emQbit.com
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