Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Friday 18 March 2005 11:48 am, Greg London wrote:
> I am not affiliated with Creative Commons.
> I am not a lawyer.
> I am, however, an ASIC engineer.

I am none of the three.
>
> My understanding of teh GPL is that you can combine
> GPL code with non-GPL code on your local machine.
> The GPL-mixing-only-with-other-GPL requirement
> only kicks in if you DISTRIBUTE the work.

I am confident that the GPL only requires you to give out your modifications 
if you distribute. Not if you use. It also permits you to make mods and keep 
them private if you do not distribute.
>
> So, you can get a core off of opencores
> and you mix it with your proprietary verilog locally,
> and create your own ASIC.
>
> You would not be able to distribute the resulting work
> in verilog unless you put the whole thing under GPL.
>
> Now, I'm not certain, but I THINK that distribution
> of silicon does not qualify as distribution of the
> work itself. I believe that is functional instead
> of "expression" and functional isn't covered by copyright.

I am very ignorant here, but I will point out that hardware firewall/router 
manufacturers are feeling the GPLs effects.

http://gpl-violations.org/news/20050314-cebit-letter-action.html

That is now in the news. I seem to remember linksys having problems in the 
past which I think were supposed to have been resolved.
>
> The alternative would be to put all open cores under
> something like the LGPL and define the boundary as
> the verilog module layer.
>

all the best,

drew