Re: Hardware license

[Rich Walker <rw@shadow.org.uk>]

> Rich Walker <rw@shadow.org.uk> wrote:
> > Terry Hancock <hancock@anansispaceworks.com> writes:

> > > The LART license is probably required reading on this subject ;-)
> > > 
> > > http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/LICENSE
> 
> This is pretty much the same as the BSD license.  You suggested that
> you wanted to copyleft your work, so it may not work for you.  It is
> certainly DFSG-free.

Okay; thanks. That's also the precise philosophical point I was hoping
someone else would illuminate.

> > http://www.opencores.org/OIPC/OHGPL.shtml. 
> > 
> > Are these both compliant licenses?
> 
> The OpenIPCore license is a more of a copyleft, so you'll probably be
> happier with it.  Looking through the license, it looks mostly ok.
> The only thing that caught my eye is section 5
> 
>   5. Any modification of this hardware design or any derivative work
>      from it should be documented by providing list of changes,
>      reasons behind the changes and the date of change.
> 
> Requiring people to list the _reasons_ for a change is somewhere
> closer to the edge of DFSG-free than I'd like.  It might be fine with
> it, but it'd be better to just change it to
> 
>   5. Any modification of this hardware design or any derivative work
>      from it should be documented by providing a list and the date of
>      the change.

For a hardware design, I can see that providing this documentation is
more necessary than for a software design. diff doesn't work that well
on most sorts of hardware documentation. I'll raise this with the
OpenIPCore people and see why they did it this way. 

cheers,  Rich Walker.

-- 
rich walker | technical person | Shadow Robot Company | rw@shadow.org.uk
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