26 Apr
2013
26 Apr
'13
9:54 a.m.
On 4/26/13, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think OpenCores is despicable; they're
about as close to
something like SourceForge as you get with FPGA stuff. I don't
think they have a license that they require you to use for projects
(or at least they didn't a few years ago), so lots of projects are
GPL or BSD licensed. GPL cores, obviously, present some issues
when using them in commercial products, but most of the ones I've
used are BSD or similar.
Perhaps GPLv3 has gone in a different direction, but in the past I had
the impression that the FSF didn't care too much about embedded
systems if there was no provision for the user to directly execute
code on the device. So for example, the GPL would be not be invoked
for your FPGA-powered toaster oven with no interface beyond the
temperature knob. I dimly recall Richard Stallman himself saying
something to that effect.
Or is this a legal grey area and nobody wants the risk of using a GPL'ed core?
-Andy