Re: gEDA-user: firmware and the GPL license

["Duncan Drennan" <duncan.drennan@xxxxxxxxx>]

> BTW, did you know that RMS *does* consider the Verilog/VHDL that is
> used to program an FPGA software?  Hence, GPL *does* apply to
> programmable hardware.
>
> > Perhaps it is time for a new license in the spirit of GPL,
>
> See http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html

From the TAPR ohl,

1.6  This Agreement does not apply to software, firmware, or code
loaded into programmable devices which may be used in conjunction with
Documentation or Products.  Such software is subject to the license
terms established by its copyright holder(s).

Any code is a written document which means it falls under licensing
and copyright issues. TAPR is specifically aimed at hardware (they
consider schematics, gerbers etc. to be "documentation" of the
hardware and that forms part of the license).

I've been doing some reading on GPL and BSD which has been quite
interesting. The GPL people are typically against BSD style licenses
(so-called copycentre), as described here,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html. They also feel that
the LGPL should be applied only to cases where there are equivalent
proprietary libraries (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html).

At the end of the day, it is really dependant on your intention. If
you feel that everything based on, or linking to your code should be
open, then use the GPL. Obviously, you can also dual license (remember
you as the copyright holder can assign other licenses as you see fit).

Alternatively if you want people to be able to use your code without
open sourcing their own code, maybe the LGPL, or possibly some mild
variation would be suitable. I'm not really too sure about the
implications of the LGPL though, so beware before diving in.

The kind of license that I would want to use if I wrote a reusable
library for a uC would be something like this,

1) You can use and link the code into a bigger work without having to
open source the combined work.
2) Modifications to the licensed part of the work must be release
under the same license (i.e. improvements modifications etc. are
contributed back to the community).


_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user