While I certainly do not condone piracy, and I believe Xilinx should be com pensated for their hard work, sometimes it can be handy to run ISE without limitations on the range of targetable devices and without having to go thr ough the rather annoying 30-day evaluation license generation.
For the purpose of disabling the license checks, install ISE 14.7 (20131013 ) and make sure to create a ~/.Xilinx/Xilinx.lic (can be empty). With a hex editor, open /opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/lib/lin64/libSecurity.so (md5: ba
5974651af72b9296f76e40bc432679) and at offset 0x3EABA, which is the epilogu e of Sec_Checkout, replace the two bytes 89 D8 with B0 42 (mov al, 0x42).
The new md5 will be 3d29e8d3c00ea2bb5beb406bcb9df95d. This effectively bypa sses te license verification, and restrictions on targetable devices will b e lifted.
piracy: the act of reproducing someone's else (art) work without permission
copyright infringement: unauthorized used of a copyrighted material.
license: set of permission granted by the licensor to the licensee to use a product.
By doing what you are doing you are certainly not promoting piracy, since there's no reproduction of any artwork in your 'advise'.
On the contrary you are suggesting you have more rights than the ones the licensor (Xilinx) gave you in the license. (I recall you that you accepted the license the very same moment you decided to use their software).
The reason why Xilinx issues the license the way it does and copyrights their products that way is because they consider that 'running ISE without limitations' is affecting negatively their business and they want to protect it.
If you really believe you have the rights to 'run ISE without limitations' you can post your name and address so that any Xilinx representative here on the group may get in touch with you and kindly explain what are your rights and what are theirs. Or maybe you can simply give them a call and see what they think.
That being said, I strongly discourage anyone in this group to follow such practices and stand against such advices.
OTOH if the OP wants to work hard on a GPLed toolchain for fpgas in order to really be able to *run it without limitations*, I'd be more than happy to promote and contribute to that effort.
agreeing with alb, this is a license breach issue and not promotion of pira ting acts.
I agree; there is no other point to be made here; accepting a license for a licensable work is a binary decision.
It would be great to see such an effort that many of us would contribute. I f you are looking into a logic synthesis open-source project with a lot of potential, I would suggest YOSYS
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by Clifford Wo lf. Clifford does a great job in filtering out multiple and contradicting u ser proposals and I think the project progresses well. On some aspects, it is already commercial-grade work.
1: an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery
2: robbery on the high seas
3 a : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
b : the illicit accessing of broadcast signals
Merriam-Webster's definition 3a of piracy pretty well fits what the OP says that he/she has done and is enabling others to do the same...all while claiming to not 'condone piracy'.
I must admit that I've always only considered piracy as the act of 'copying/reproducing' without permission, hence not really applicable to what the OP was doing.
But, in light of what you said and what I read through a deeper search on the subject, piracy is also covering the 'use' without permission and therefore covers license infringement:
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Not all countries though associate 'piracy' to the unauthorized use of software as the OP described. For instance in Italy I haven't found material related to such a intimate link between misuse and piracy [1]. In fact piracy is mostly associated to 'duplicating' illegally the software/media (often related to file sharing and other practices that cause financial damage to copyrights holders).
Al
[1] my search is by far not exhaustive and I'd be happy to be disconfirmed by others.
It doesn't really matter much what we call it - it is illegal, immoral and unethical to use legally licensed software beyond the rights of the licence. And it is illegal, immoral and unethical to help others do so. It is up to the laws and courts of different countries or jurisdictions to decide whether any particular case is a criminal offence or a civil offence, but at a minimum it will be copyright infringement and breaking a contract or licence.
However, as far as I am concerned, copyright infringement is not "theft" or "stealing", as these terms require that the rightful owner loses access to the "stolen" item. Similarly, it is not "piracy" since it is not theft or criminal violence at sea. The use of these terms in copyright infringement is designed to invoke an emotional response and make the infringement seem far worse than it really is, and do not help anyone.
how would you react if somebody opened your safe and got accesses to your most valuable thoughts/ideas?
Imagine you do not have the means to protect your thoughts/ideas in a safe manner and somebody strong enough and powerful enough can spoil your weaknesses and use your thoughts/ideas to make profits.
Imagine your thoughts/ideas used against you to constraint your freedom. Imagine your thoughts/ideas used against your people...
To make things straight, I do not care less of what Tomas D. does or says, but I do care for those who might, one day, think that what Tomas D. said today was not so bad in the end.
"immoral"??? Really? You consider the "misuse" of FPGA development software to be "immoral"? It is illegal by definition. I'm not sure I consider it to be unethical in all cases even. There are times when I can't use the stuff because of a license expiring and the licensing process taking days. If I were to crack the license on a copy of the free FPGA development software so I can get my work done while waiting for a license file, I don't consider that to be either "immoral" or "unethical".
Well, that's a matter for personal opinion. Probably we all can think of times when we have cheated on licences or abused copyright and which we don't view as immoral or unethical - and we can all think of times when other people have done so that we /do/ think is immoral or unethical (I know that applies to me). In general, I would view breaking code to gain free use of software that normally costs significant amounts of money as unethical - but I am certainly not going to judge someone who merely "bends" the rules a little to get their work done, especially when the result is more sales for the supplier. There is plenty of grey area here - but I think the person posting the crack is well into the black area.
These types of 'malfunctions' will never be accepted as a justification for cracking the license and/or the license server. It would be equivalent to stealing a car because yours is temporary out of gas!
In nearly every license there's a clause of NO WARRANTY that you accept when using the software and while the software provider is relatively keen to solve 'major' problems, they might not be equally interested to get you out of the mud because you screwed up.
We all know that s**t happens and when it happens your only legal choice is to call them and try to get an answer.
License managers are far away from perfection as any other artifact. Nevertheless they provide a sufficiently detailed debugging infrastructure to spot the issue rather soon. In your bug report provide the log files of your lmgrd (is *always* good practice to store logging information from the server to a file).
Often the issue is on your side and it's handled by some call center delocalized in Sumatra. Some times though your question might trigger a patch.
with flexlm you can use lmremove in those cases, there's still an issue of 'linger time' of 30 minutes which may affect you, but depending on how many of you are using the license server you can simply think about restarting the flexlm which will spawn the vendor daemons and clear their internal list of used licenses, causing all users to lose their grants. Usually the license grant is regained as soon as the lmgrd is restarted, but it may happen that the license module in the client application has caused the application to quit in the meantime.
The FLEXlm UM is IMO quite easy to follow:
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If the software product and their licensing schemes do not suit you well, instead of breaking the law and forging the contract you signed when you bought the product, put more efforts in alternative products with a licensing philosophy that suit you more.
As a customer we always have a choice and we should use it to send clear messages to vendors. Unfortunately the EDA tools empire is highly fortified and cluttered by millions of patents which eventually minimize your available choice.
Don't forget though that one of the most powerful means the EDA vendors have to stay afloat is through 'lock ins'. Even if you crack the license but *use* their software, you'll spread it within your organization and create consense, expertise and an infrastructure around that product that would be difficult to get away from. EDA vendors know that and can push this philosophy to the extreme, i.e. as long as you use their software they won't care much if you've paid for it.
If someone would tell me, that there's a weakness in my safe, I would do my best to make it safer. You wouldn't do the same?
Anybody doesn't have to say the open code of my safe, as in this case, I didn't tell the methods how to get the software hacked, but the word has been spread for a long time now.
I'd appreciate if somebody tells me that I have a weakness in my safer, on the contrary I would certainly not be happy if the same guy posts a message wide open on newsserver mirrored a gazillion times with my code in big letters.
This is actually what you did. You provided the exact sequence on how to
*crack* (not *hack*, see the difference here on the 4th paragraph:
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