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Re: Another copyright issue
On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 09:02, Bart Veer wrote:
> >>>>> "Gary" == Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc dot com> writes:
>
> Gary> As part of one of the ports I've recently done, I had to
> Gary> add a couple of files which require special consideration.
> Gary> They are binary data, and only applicable to a particular
> Gary> device (nonetheless required to build RedBoot on the device
> Gary> since it needs them to initialize the hardware).
>
> Gary> The producer of the files (the hardware manufacturer) has
> Gary> allowed their use, but they want their copyright on them.
> Gary> I have amended this to look like this:
>
> Gary> //
> Gary> // Copyright (c) 2003 Intrinsyc Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.
> Gary> //
> Gary> // Redistribution and use in source or binary format is allowed
> Gary> // provided:
> Gary> // * This notice must be preserved
> Gary> // * The binary data which this file represents may only be
> Gary> // used on a NMI uPCI + uE250 based hardware platform.
> Gary> //
>
> Gary> which I believe preserves their use in the spirit of open source.
>
> Gary> Does anyone have a problem with this?
>
> I think we do have to be careful about this sort of thing. We don't
> want to get into a situation where people contribute HAL packages
> which are just prebuilt binaries, encoded in a big C array or
> similar. That sort of thing makes it impossible to customize the HAL
> for specific application requirements. The GPL uses the phrase
> "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and I
> think that is a good standard to work to.
>
> Now, there are certainly cases where you need to feed magic numbers to
> hardware or it won't work. I don't have a problem with that, within
> reason. In this case uE250_pci_bitstream.h is 389K and
> uE250_plx_bitstream.h is 130K. That seems like an awful lot of magic,
> more than the rest of the platform HAL. I would certainly like to
> understand why the platform needs such a large amount of magic.
>
This system uses FPGA devices for a number of peripherals (the
PCI bus in particular). The only way to use those devices is
to program them - at boot time - with this data. The only place
to hold this data on the platform is in the FLASH. So, the choice
would be to have some very-hard-to-initialize-and-maintain way
to get it into part of the FLASH, or make it be part of RedBoot,
which is what I chose.
n.b. this sort of thing will become more and more popular in
the future. FPGA and soft-core systems are beginning to be
very common.
--
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Gary Thomas |
MLB Associates | Consulting for the
+1 (970) 229-1963 | Embedded world
http://www.mlbassoc.com/ |
email: <gary at mlbassoc dot com> |
gpg: http://www.chez-thomas.org/gary/gpg_key.asc
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