[cc-community] The Question of Manufacturing Copyleft

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Thu Nov 1 20:04:17 EST 2007


> Greg London wrote:
>> If you just want to make sure derivatives are made available,
>> you'd just have to stipulate that derivatives, even derivatives
>> that are not distributed
>
> Wait! That would be legit under a copyright license, wouldn't it?

Yeah. I think that would work with just a license, and would
not require a contract.

I should have patented the idea before mentioninging it.
Dang it.

;)

> How about this ... the license could simply make this requirement --
> take boilerplate from one of the "OSD approved"/"non-free talk-back"
> licenses.
>
> THEN, it could EXEMPT anyone from that requirement who meets the other
> parts of the copyleft requirements.

I'm not sure what the "other parts" of the requirements are.

The idea is that since an actual chip is not a derivative,
copyright law doesn't consider distributing a chip the same
as distributing a derivative of the source code.

So, from a copyright point of view, Alice gets your source,
makes a derivative, keeps the derivative private, (copyright
law ends at this point), and then Alice sells the chip from
that source code, which isn't under the copyright umbrella,
so can't be covered by a license.

What you want is a license that prevents Alice from keeping
a derivative private and does not hinge on distribution of a
derivative. As long as the license requires all derivatives
to be made public, then Alice can't keep her changes private
and hide them and distribute them in the form of an asic.

Enforcement is always optional. And more than likely,
you won't care about all the intermediate derivatives they
made to a core, you just want the version that was used
in their latest asic. And if they release that version under
your hardware copyleft license*, then no need to go after them
for not making all the intermediate derivatives public too.

> Am I making sense here?

That, or we're both crazy.

;)

Greg London

(*) Hardware Copyleft License. Is that it's name?



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