Re: [oc] New License update

[Jamil Khatib <jamilkhatib75@yahoo.com>]

--- John Dalton <johnd@southern-poro.com> wrote:
> COMMENT ONE
> 
> Section 2 b) of the GPL requires that any changes to
> a
> program be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
> 
> It is not clear (by my reading) that the OpenIPcore
> license
> (v0.20) requires changes to be distributed under the
> terms
> of the OpenIPcore license.  Section 8 says that you
> must distribute
> the original design under the terms of the
> OpenIPcore license,
> but it does not explicitly refer to derived works.
> 

1. This license is based on LGPL where so based works
and derivative works can be under any license. This is
the main difference between this license and the old
one. this change is upon request from commerical
community so as to enable them to implement the
opensource design which may need some changes for the
implementation that can not be revealed by them.

2. we need another license like the old one to put
morerestrictions on the derived and based works


> In my view, freedom of derived works is the core
> benefit
> of the GPL.  If this is the intent of the OpenIPcore
> license,
> it should be made more explicit.
> 
> COMMENT TWO
> 
> In my opinion, poor grammar makes sections of the
> license
> ambiguous.  For example, section 6 does not mean
> anything to me.
> Once the terms of the license have been finalized,
> perhaps one
> of GNU's lawyers could translate it into unambiguous
> legal speak?

yes I am not a lawyer but section 6 enables any one to
use your open hardware design as is in any other
design with no restriction


> 
> COMMENT THREE
> 
> Has anyone figured out whether the GPL can be
> applied
> directly to a design, alleviating the need for yet
> another
> license?  If an extra license is required, can it be
> derived
> form the GPL, with a minimum number of changes? 
> After all,
> the GPL has stood for over 15 years.
> 
>

the GPL protects only programs which is not our case.

Anyhow the openhardware protection is more complecated
than that because here we provide a copyright
protection for the design files only and so we can not
restrict anyone from implementing the design itself
which should be covered by patents or NDA
 
> On a personal note, I would not be comfortable
> applying the
> OpenIPcore license to a design unless it ensures the
> freedom of derived works.
> 
> Hope these comments are useful.
> 
> John Dalton
> 
> 
Regards
Jamil Khatib

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