Re: [oc] Inquiry

[John Kent <jekent@optushome.com.au>]

Hi everyone ...

Seems like a popular discussion, so I'll wade in with my 2 cents worth.

Its nice to have the cudos of having your design compete with comercial
designs, but to do so, you have to accept that people want to make money
out of it.

Open Cores and GPL licences seem to me almost like a socialist utopia
were people do everything for the glory rather than hard cold cash.
Its tempting to "stick it into" the comercial guys, but hey everyone needs
to make a living .... Those people who contribute cores (including me)
need some sort of income to live on, so really Open Cores is subsidised
by either unemployment benefits or a comercial company or government
anyway.

My feeling is that you get what you pay for. If you are serious about a
comercial design, you should not use Open Cores code. I treat Open Cores
as a learning experience to see worked example of how to write VHDL and
verilog, and for that I've found it very useful.

I tried adapting a 68K multitasking kernel from Doctor Dobbs Journal
many years ago for a comercial application. I ended up rewritting it because
it did not work. Free software, or free IP is not free if you have to 
maintain
it, and given that the GPL stipulates that modifications be accessible 
to every one,
you are giving you work and money away in doing so.

John Kent.

-- 
http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent



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