Re: [myhdl-list] DSX1000 Open-source Delta-Sigma DAC IP Core (MyHDL)

[Jan D. <ja...@ja...>]

George Pantazopoulos wrote:

> 
> Hi Jan, you raise some great points and I too want wide adoption.
> 
>      I didn't put a lot of thought into the license and am open to 
> changing it. I don't mind opening it up for free commercial use as well. 
> How would the LGPL license work in terms of hardware IP cores?

As far as I'm concerned, it's the best option that I'm aware of.

First of all, the GPL family of licenses is widely used, time tested,
and, most importantly, whenever I put some serious thought in it,
its features are exactly what I personally want.

I assume the GPL-like features are familiar, so there's no need to
discuss them further here.

However, the full GPL license itself is not what I want for MyHDL or for
IP cores that I would write. When someone uses MyHDL or an IP core of
mine, I want the GPL conditions to apply only to the code that I
originally wrote, not to the user's own code. That's enough for me.
In this way, a user can keep his own code private if he wants to.
I think that otherwise, commercial users won't touch it.

With the GPL itself, my requirements cannot be fulfilled, because
the license would extend to all code that uses MyHDL or the IP
core. But with the LGPL, I get exactly what I want.

If you look on opencores.org, you'll see that they would like
everyone to use the LGPL as much as possible. So apparently
they came to the same conclusion.

Jan

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