Re: Another copyright issue

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

Bart Veer wrote:
>>>>>>"Gary" == Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com> writes:
> 
> 
>     <snip>
>     Gary> This system uses FPGA devices for a number of peripherals
>     Gary> (the PCI bus in particular). The only way to use those
>     Gary> devices is to program them - at boot time - with this data.
>     Gary> The only place to hold this data on the platform is in the
>     Gary> FLASH. So, the choice would be to have some
>     Gary> very-hard-to-initialize-and-maintain way to get it into part
>     Gary> of the FLASH, or make it be part of RedBoot, which is what I
>     Gary> chose.
> 
>     Gary> n.b. this sort of thing will become more and more popular in
>     Gary> the future.  FPGA and soft-core systems are beginning to be
>     Gary> very common.
> 
> Understood. Using a couple of 100K of flash for this sort of thing
> seems expensive, but maybe with current hardware it has become
> economical.
> 
> I suspect Stallman would want the VHDL (or whatever) source files
> included in the package in addition to the generated bitstreams, but I
> consider that unnecessary.

I don't think so. Firstly, arguably it's a separately linked work anyway - 
it's just data as far as eCos is concerned after all. It's not actually 
linked with eCos as such.

Secondly, the GPL exception we have would exempt it anyway, although if 
you don't believe the first point above applies, then this would render 
this port vanilla GPL incompatible.

Jifl
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