In article , Kevin Brace writes: |> The no-academic research restriction is there because I want to charge |> more than $100 for research-related academic use.
Let me get this straight. The use should be
- non-commercial - non-profit - non-academic research - strictly personal purposes
So who the hell should license that core? I can understand that you rule out commercial use, I *could* understand if you ruled out industrial research.
But ruling out academic research because you want to charge *more* from universities is reducing the number of potential customers pretty much to zero.
thank you for your interest in our free VHDL PCI core. The VHDL code is provided to you free of charge and we ask you not to pass it on to any third parties.
The design has been tested and is expected to run smoothly. However, no support or design guidance is guaranteed. Its use is at your own risk and you take over full liability.
We reserve the right to name you/your company as reference user. In turn, you ought to reference us as origin of the PCI core in the final product description (e.g. manual, flyer etc.).
Code documentation is also at early stage, since the VHDL design is part of a bigger project. Once there is time left in the project schedule, we will round up the documentation.
To sum up the conditions:
- the code is provided free of charge
- no guarantee is given what so ever
- you agree to be named as reference user
- you must not pass the code on to third parties
- documentation is at early stage and support can not be guaranteed
- a reference (acknowledgement notice) to us as origin of the PCI core must be included in the final product description
Finally, we would appreciate your feedback about functionality, application scenarios, documentation and code add ons.
We ask you to agree to the conditions given above by means of an appropriate email answer. The VHDL PCI core will be emailed to you as soon as your compliance email arrives.
Regards,
Torsten Lauter & Thomas Knoll
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"Rainer Buchty" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:c1kdrj$2h1f3$ snipped-for-privacy@sunsystem5.informatik.tu-muenchen.de...
The $100 license for my PCI IP core is not intended for prototyping of a commercial product. Whoever wanting to use it in a commercial product should get a commercial license which will cost several thousand dollars because that's what other firms charge for a comparable PCI IP core, and that's probably how much I need to get paid to run a business, and make a living out of doing of it. My intention for the $100 PCI IP core license is that hobbyists, FPGA enthusiasts, and students simply cannot afford commercial PCI IP cores which cost several thousand dollars, but they probably want a commercial quality PCI IP core for something they can afford to pay. Realistically speaking, I don't believe they are willing to pay anything more than $100 for such a PCI IP core, so that's how much I can probably charge. From a business perspective, if I can get 100 users to pay $100, I will earn $10,000, which is comparable to several commercial design wins. The only problem is, as the number of licensees grow, the quality of technical support will probably degrade because I will be have to deal with more licensees.
The $100 PCI IP core license is intended for hobbyists, FPGA enthusiasts, Verilog learners, and students who want to make their own PCI device for personal use. I believe there are potentially several hundred people in the US who are willing to pay $100 for the license. It is my perception that people who do research can probably pay more than a personal user, so I feel like I should charge more for a license than a personal user. If cost is that much of an issue, ask Xilinx because I read in this newsgroup while back that they do sometimes donate their PCI IP core to educational institutions. I just don't intend to compete with a free one.
That's about as smart as PHB's who insist on buying commercial software and avoiding open source software as they want to know who they can sue if they have problems. I know web-based sales are more anonymous than traditional shops, but isn't decending from "the customer is always right" to "the customer is probably a thief" going a bit far?
If someone within the US decides to "steal" your core by using it in a commercial product, or, heaven forbid, learning something by using it (academic research being also forbidden), what exactly are you going to do about it? The likely culprit will either be someone too small to be worth bothering about since they would not have bought a full license anyway, or big enough that lawyers fees and a court battle would cost far more than its worth.
When you are selling high-price software (and presumably this applies to your fully licensed core), you can afford to use tight legal licenses and agreements that will be internationally enforcable. But for low-price software available by download, you have to accept that there will be a certain amount of illegal use of the software. That's a fact, and you won't change it. You won't be able to stop it, and you won't be able to sue the abusers. There are a few things you can do to stop this being a problem - one is to make sure users can see the advantages of using the part legally, such as better support, upgrades, restrictions in the evaluation parts functionality (such as limited run time, as used by Altera's OpenCore system, or lower performance), etc. Another is to widen your market - if removing the "US-only" restriction gives you ten times as many paying customers, would it matter if it also gave you a hundred times as many pirates?
So please reconsider your attitude here, or perhaps stick to what you know best (which is presumably VHDL design and pci cores :-) and get someone else to handle your sales and marketting.
I believe that you have almost no possibility of realisticly enforcing your contracts with people within the USA - for a start, how do you intend to identify abusers of your software? Even if you find someone whom you can prove has broken the contract, it would cost you far more time and money that it is worth wasting. Your market would not be big enough that it would be worth going after a few cheats as "examples to others".
There are many countries in the rest of the world - and in many of them, it is much easier and cheaper to enforce such contracts than in the USA. And for those countries where it would be harder - if your core is so much better than other available cores or home-writen cores, and the people/companies are so corrupt that they would take your core without paying the full license, then they are going to be able to get hold of it anyway so you might as well take their $100 rather than nothing.
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