From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 31857 invoked by alias); 26 Feb 2003 16:56:26 -0000 Mailing-List: contact ecos-maintainers-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: ecos-maintainers-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 31850 invoked from network); 26 Feb 2003 16:56:25 -0000 Message-ID: <3E5CF1B7.4070402@eCosCentric.com> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 16:56:00 -0000 From: Jonathan Larmour User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021203 X-Accept-Language: en-gb, en, en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Bart Veer Cc: gary@mlbassoc.com, ecos-maintainers@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Another copyright issue References: <1046272511.31018.6102.camel@hermes.chez-thomas.org> <20030226160243.95BD4EC6F1@delenn.bartv.net> <1046275913.31018.6295.camel@hermes.chez-thomas.org> <20030226164202.93699EC6F1@delenn.bartv.net> In-Reply-To: <20030226164202.93699EC6F1@delenn.bartv.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-02/txt/msg00063.txt.bz2 Bart Veer wrote: >>>>>>"Gary" == Gary Thomas writes: > > > > 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 -- eCosCentric http://www.eCosCentric.com/ The eCos and RedBoot experts --[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]-- --[ can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln ]-- Opinions==mine