practical experience with GPL IP core in commercial product

Quoting the Preamble:

"To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others."

and again:

"...if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code."

Meaning that using GPL'ed work with proprietary work is *viable* only if proprietary work is licensed under a GPL-compatible license.

I believe you are distorting my statements. The terms required by the GPL do not apply to the GPL'ed portion only, they apply to the entire work:

"You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged"

Licenses like GPL are defined *viral* or *copyleft*, meaning that they call for distrubution under the *very same terms* for any derivative work.

Quoting RMS

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?If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too.?

The license 'enforce' the obligation to license a derived work under the same terms. And that is the reason why GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible, since they both would require to have the larger program released under each of them, which is not possible.

Al

Reply to
alb
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Hi Rick,

rickman wrote: []

from Wikipedia: "In ordinary language, the term crime denotes an unlawful act punishable by a state".

The simple fact that is punishable, qualifies it as a crime. And sooner or later someone may have access to those 'blocks' and legitimately sue you for license infringement.

Al

Reply to
alb

Actually there is no law broken by violating the terms of the license. So no crime is committed in any event.

This is a licensing issue, a civil matter. If the license says you distribute the source code in the same manner as the compiled code, you should be able to include it in the internal Flash. Very easy on a device that is very possibly running Linux anyway.

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

Hi Rick,

In article you wrote: []

I'm not sure if license infringement can be qualified as copyright infringement, but the latter may have criminal provisions. So it's a crime. And in 2007 violations of the GPLv2 was claimed by SFLC which filed coopyright infringement lawsuits.

No matter how you turn it around, you should allow people to *see* the source and be able to modify, no matter which distribution mean you use. If your flash has an image of a GNU/Linux system it has to have the sources as well (not a lot practical for an embedded system with size constraints).

Al

Reply to
alb

The GPL builds on copyright laws, rather than licensing laws. There are various reasons for this (IANAL) - I think part of it is that a licence involves an agreement between two parties, while copyright is decided entirely by the author/owner of the work.

Copyright laws are mostly civil laws - and therefore breaking them is not a crime, and can lead to fines, compensation suites, and cease-and-desist orders but not jail sentences. Copyright infringements /can/ be a crime if there is significant financial gain by breaking the terms of the copyright. (So if you copy a film and give it away, you can be sued for compensation by the copyright owner - but if you sell lots of copies, you can be jailed.) Breaking "technical restrictions to enforce copyright" can also be a crime in some countries (like the USA with the DCMA laws) - but that does not apply with the source code is easily available.

Thus GPL abuses will normally be civil law violations, but might be criminal if the abuser made money while depriving the rightful owner from the market.

Reply to
David Brown

The license doesn't actually say that; earlier posts in this thread were sl ightly misleading.

The license gives you some options on how to do it, but the gist is the sou rce has to be made available and transferred to others downstream in a conv entional manner. 8-track tapes is probably a stretch in this day and age; buried in flash blocks only accessible via JTAG/BDM is probably out of the question.

Reply to
O.J.K.

No, I've been involved in Free Software and OSS for over 20 years now, I know the difference. The GPL is effective at protecting the freedom (as in speech) of software *because* copying source code is effectively free (as in beer).

I didn't say software was free (as in beer), I said it can be copied for effectively free. How many man-hours of labor does it take to copy a megabyte of data? How much internet cost does it take to transfer that? These costs are typically trivial (essentially free) relative to the development and other costs of a package (which the GPL allows you to be compensated for, and rightfully so).

I've looked at some of them, and inevitably there's something in the EDA chain that's proprietary, which kinda ruins it. But even so, my point was, you can't just "copy" a resistor or FPGA device, you have to buy each one. The non-trivial cost of such hardware "changes the game" relative to software, which is why the FSF itself didn't get involved.

Meanwhile, the Open Harware groups are doing a great job at producing hardware for which all the design files and specs are open, but design files and specs are - wait for it - just data. It's not the hardware itself that's freely copyable, it's the design of the hardware that's copyable. Each instance of the hardware still has to be made "from new parts" as it were.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

Yup, I agree. However, there are many GPL-compatible licenses out there. My point is that combining a GPL'd part with a something-else'd part does NOT make the whole work GPL'd, it makes the whole work some hybrid that's a combination of both sets of terms. The something-else'd part might, for example, be *more* strict about freedom than the GPL.

The terms apply, just like the terms of any other licensed part apply. The result is the intersection of all the terms. One set does not override the other.

I see no such "definition" in the GPL. It's a license. It has terms, like any other license. You must follow them, like any other license. This is why you should have lawyers read the licenses - they know to avoid shock terms like "viral" and "copyleft" and tell you what you can actually do.

RMS is not the GPL. Quote the license, not people talking about it.

No, *compatible* terms. Not the *same* terms.

The GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible because they have incompatible license terms within, and combining the two results in an empty intersection of terms - there are no terms under which you can distribute the result.

Note that GPLv1 and GPLv2 *are* compatible.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

Not trying to be argumentative, but what aspect of open sourcing does the cost of hardware impact? I don't really follow what you are saying.

Yes, but why does that change anything? The purpose of open source software is to open the exchange of ideas. Open source hardware does the same thing, no?

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

Making money is not required. See section (C) below.

(a) Criminal Infringement. ?

(1) In general. ? Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed ?

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

So releasing any work by "a computer network" that was intended for "commercial distribution" is committing a crime. I'm not clear on what "commercial distribution" implies, but I'm not sure it requires a profit motive.

Not sure how this might apply to GPL code since the act that makes it a copyright violation (not sharing the source) means you can't be in violation of section (C)...

However, section (A) is easy enough to qualify for. All you need to do is sell one copy of your derivative work without satisfying the GPL,

*if* this is covered under copyright law. If a license is given and you fail to live up to the terms of the license, that is a licensing issue, not a copyright issue.
--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

I don't recall the details, I just remember that it was the fundamental difference between hardware and software - software could be copied for trivial cost and effort but hardware couldn't. You can easily give a copy of a file to friends, but it's a lot harder to give a copy of a cell phone to a friend. Imagine how hard it would be if, each time you borrowed someone's cell phone, they had to give you a factory capable of making that phone! Yes, that's an extreme example, but in the Free Software world, you *can* easily give someone everything they need to build a copy of an app. That makes it a lot easier for the GPL to say you *must* give it, and still be successful as a license.

Yes, but again, it's the designs for the hardware that are shared. You can't share a resistor across two projects, but you can share the schematics that include that resistor. Still, despite how easy it is to share a schematic, and despite a license allowing you to do so, turning that into hardware is nontrivial.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

(snip)

I was not so long ago wondering about PC board design from verilog.

That is, I could design a multiple FPGA, plus some other external logic all in verilog, then generate the PC boards to connect them all together.

Could a verilog PC board description be GPL'ed?

I presume a PC board design itself could be copyrighted, as an expression of an idea in art, but then again someone else could generate a different expression of the idea that does the same thing electrically.

That might make the distinction between hardware and software a little more obvious than the FPGA case.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

If you really think this is a 4 week project you are better off doing it yourself. Your company is going to spend a lot more effort and money trying to hash this all out than your 4 weeks. Tell your boss the GPL thing is out and you need 6 weeks

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas
Reply to
Joe Chisolm

Any restriction of those freedoms is prohibited under the GPL and will prevent redistribution under the terms of GPL.

Quoting the GPLv3 text

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"5. Conveying Modified Source Versions. [...] c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it."

BTW, RMS does not simply talk about the GPL (like I do), he wrote it.

Touche :-)

That is because GPLv1 lacks of the obligation to convey covered work under the same terms of the license, a major change between the two versions.

Al

Reply to
alb

Sure. Of course, that just passes the problem off to whoever uses that verilog to make hardware :-)

Reply to
DJ Delorie

Not restrictions of freedoms, stricter about freedoms. I.e. *more* free. I can't think of a good example at the moment, though.

That might be the reason why so many projects, including the Linux kernel, refuse to use GPLv3, and instead use GPLv2. The OP didn't say what version of the GPL was involved. But still...

"7... You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission."

This is the "intersection of terms" clause. Copyright lets you do

*nothing* with a work unless you're given permission by the copyright holder. The GPL gives you permission to do certain things. Other licenses may give you other permissions as per sec 7. The result is the intersection of these, where the things you are permitted to do are allowed by both licenses.

GPLv3 was not written by RMS, but by the FSF lawyers, but that's not the point. Even if he was the sole author, he still paraphrases and generalizes when he talks about it.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

I think you have mixed up something about this and lost the point of the issue. If you share a software design, you still need a hardware platform to run it on. I can't run lots of open source software because it is for hardware that I don't have. If you share a hardware design someone will need to build the hardware. I can't see how open source hardware is fundamentally different from open source software.

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

If you look at it that way, there's no difference. But if you look at it that way, you're still licensing the data and requiring [relatively] costly hardware to use it with.

The difference in the FSF's case is that "pure software" needs only standard computing machines (pcs, workstations, embedded linux devices, etc) to run. One can treat the software independently of the hardware it runs on, but still fully protect it. The GPL is a license for that kind of software, where the issue of obtaining suitable hardware can be essentially ignored. The software's preferred source format and binary format are both just data, and the GPL protects the freedom of both the source and binary formats.

In the case of open hardware, the hardware can't be ignored, because it's effectively the "binary form" of the design. The license can't just ignore the hardware, else it wouldn't be able to protect the freedom of the hardware's design. But, the hardware can't be trivially copied - it has to be manufactured instead.

To apply to open hardware, the GPL would thus need to apply to a manufacturing scenario, where real costs are involved, which is something the FSF did not want to get involved in.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

This is not at all clear to me. Please explain. The license covers use and propagation of the design. Why is that different if it is for a PCB or for code burned into a Flash ROM? You keep saying the same things without explaining them.

You state that a hardware license has to "apply" to a manufacturing scenario without explaining what that means.

I don't see anything in your argument that is different between hardware designs and software designs. It is the design that is licensed and the embodiment is irrelevant.

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

I got this from the GNU RSS feed yesterday. Might be useful for this discussion.

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Guide and other info regarding GPL and others. I have not gone through the guide.

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas
Reply to
Joe Chisolm

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