Xilinx Legal
in [FPGA]
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From: Ed McGettigan on 31 Jan 2006 11:57 Ed McGettigan wrote: > > The previous link that I cited only discussed a narrow issue that > was raised to an appellate court. Try this one instead which has > notes on the on the Software License Agreement. Altera was not > claiming that they "owned" the bitstream only that use of the > bitstream was restricted to Altera only devices by the license of > the software that created it. > > http://www.iplawobserver.com/2005/09/using-softwares-output-to-copy-chips.html > One more link that which is the actual ruling made by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/01512427B6AF4BF88825707C0076B4A3/$file/0317323.pdf?openelement The first half discusses the mask claims, the latter half discusses the SW License claims on pages 17-23. Specifically on the bottom of page 23 the court found: Altera customers cannot use the software, and therefore create the bitstreams, without agreeing to the licensing agreement, including the permitted use restriction. In essence, a valid contract is a prerequisite to the creation of a bitstream from Altera software, and the jury could logically conclude that valid contracts were formed via the Altera licensing agreements before customers sent bitstreams to Clear Logic. We therefore affirm the district court?s denial of judgment (sic) as a matter of law on the final claim. Maybe we could now move any further legal oriented threads to comp.arch.fpga.legal :-) and get back to technical issues and discussions. I know at least that this will be my last post on this thread and the XDL/Open Source License threads. Ed -- Xilinx Inc.
From: fpga_toys on 31 Jan 2006 12:32 Ed McGettigan wrote: > Altera customers cannot use the software, and > therefore create the bitstreams, without agreeing to the licensing > agreement, including the permitted use restriction. In > essence, a valid contract is a prerequisite to the creation of a > bitstream from Altera software, and the jury could logically > conclude that valid contracts were formed via the Altera > licensing agreements before customers sent bitstreams to > Clear Logic. We therefore affirm the district court's denial of > judgment (sic) as a matter of law on the final claim. > > Maybe we could now move any further legal oriented threads to comp.arch.fpga.legal :-) > and get back to technical issues and discussions. I know at least that this will > be my last post on this thread and the XDL/Open Source License threads. Thanks for the clearification Ed, and the small dose of contract law is good for everyone to keep them out of the defendants chair and having to learn a whole lot more. This statement about the enforcability of an EULA contract terms should be a wake up call to those that haven't thought these issues thru. In summary, the EULA contract NDA supercedes all other rights you might have to similar information in other settings. The confusion this week over the concepts of copyright fair use while under NDA, over contridictory statements about the open nature of VDL, and other rights issues have all been useful to learn and think about so we can protect ourselves and the IP we agree to use. Hopefully it's also been a learning exercise for Xilinx too. The real economic value for Xilinx is the sale of it's chips, and at some point open source access to the tool chain will greatly benefit the companies sales by expanding uses into new markets that the existing tool chain doesn't support. Certainly easy access to Xilinx product for personal research by students and hobbiests is a market builder that yields long term benefits as those individuals influence purchasing decisions for their employers and the companies they own.
From: Eric Smith on 31 Jan 2006 17:46 Austin Lesea <austin(a)xilinx.com> writes: > There is nothing "open source" about any of Xilinx's software. Then why did the installer made me agree to the GPL and LGPL? I thought it was because Xilinx's software (ISE Foundation) included some open source software.
From: Simon Peacock on 1 Feb 2006 03:09 Actually.. yes.. if you look at the output files .. you will see it detecting and replacing counters, comparators, state machines, ram etc. Simon "DJ Delorie" <dj(a)delorie.com> wrote in message news:xn3bj4icdg.fsf(a)delorie.com... > > [disclaimer: I'm a GCC developer and former Cygwin developer] > > One key difference between Cygwin and Xilinx, is that apps built with > Cygwin also *include* part of cygwin (almost verbatim) in the > resulting binary. Do bitstreams built by Xilinx tools *include* > portions of the Xilinx tools in the resulting bitstream? Can Xilinx > point to a bitstream and say "these 1000 bits are copied from our > library" ? > > A better comparison is comparing Xilinx to GCC. The GCC license > explicitly states that binaries built *with* GCC are not affected in > any way by GCC's license. > > Note that binaries built *from* GCC (derived works) are a different > story. GCC's runtime libraries have a specific clause that covers > linking; if you build with GCC, linking doesn't incur the GPL. If you > build with something else, linking does incur the GPL.
From: David Brown on 1 Feb 2006 04:09
DJ Delorie wrote: > [disclaimer: I'm a GCC developer and former Cygwin developer] > > One key difference between Cygwin and Xilinx, is that apps built with > Cygwin also *include* part of cygwin (almost verbatim) in the > resulting binary. Do bitstreams built by Xilinx tools *include* > portions of the Xilinx tools in the resulting bitstream? Can Xilinx > point to a bitstream and say "these 1000 bits are copied from our > library" ? > > A better comparison is comparing Xilinx to GCC. The GCC license > explicitly states that binaries built *with* GCC are not affected in > any way by GCC's license. That is not quite entirely true - binaries build with gcc *are* affected by gcc's licenses. In particular, patterns of assembly code generated by gcc are generated verbatim from gcc's source code (or in some cases, gcc's low-level libraries' source code), and these sections are therefore directly affected by gcc's licenses and copyrights. There main license for gcc's source code is GPL, but there are explicitly stated exceptions to remove all restrictions and copyright assignments from the generated code, precisely so that you can do as you will with gcc-generated binaries. If Xilinx' tools also have such verbatim copying through to the generated bitstreams, and they do not have such stated exceptions, then they are in a position (in my interpretation - IANAL) to claim joint copyright ownership of the bitstream. > > Note that binaries built *from* GCC (derived works) are a different > story. GCC's runtime libraries have a specific clause that covers > linking; if you build with GCC, linking doesn't incur the GPL. If you > build with something else, linking does incur the GPL. |