Re: Another copyright issue

[Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 09:02, Bart Veer wrote:
> >>>>> "Gary" == Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.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@mlbassoc.com>  |
gpg: http://www.chez-thomas.org/gary/gpg_key.asc
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