What does GPL mean for a chip design?
I understand how it applies to the HDL, but I doubt that it obligates you have to open your code to users of physical chips.
I understand how it applies to the HDL, but I doubt that it obligates you have to open your code to users of physical chips.
But I'm looking to find someone to build this thing, it's been a while since I last built chips (last CPU I helped design never saw the light of day due to reason that had little to do with how well it worked). So I need a way to show it off, show it's real. So GPLing it is a great way to do that - as is showing up on HN (thanks to whoever posted this :-).
In practice the RTL level design of a processor is only a part of making a real processor - a real VRoom! would likely have hand built ALUs, shifters, caches, register files etc those things are all in the RTL at a high level but are really different IP - likely they'd be entangled with GPL and a manufacturer might feel that to be an issue.
However I'm happy to dual license (I want to get it built, and maybe get paid to do it).
Also about half the companies building RISCVs are in China (I've been building open source hardware in China for a decade or so now, so I know there's lots of smart people there) - they have a real problem (in the West) building something like this - all the rumors about supply chain/etc stuff - having an open sourced GPL'd reference that's cycle accurate is a way help build confidence.
I spent a few years working on an x86 clone, I had maybe 10 (now expired) patents on how to get around stupidly obvious things that Intel had patented - (or around ways to get around ways to get around In tel that other's had patented) - frankly from a technical POV it was all a lot of BS, including my patents
This is a great strategy!
> I spent a few years working on an x86 clone, I had maybe 10 (now expired) patents on how to get around stupidly obvious things that Intel had patented - (or around ways to get around ways to get around In tel that other's had patented) - frankly from a technical POV it was all a lot of BS, including my patents
It might be worthwhile to GPL implementations of those expired patents if they are at all likely to be useful. And perhaps then do a bit of procedural generation of various combinations of them for release under the GPL as well (because those would be newly patentable).
Prior art FTW!
Probably not. It's always something stupid that can be easily worked around.
The real problem is convincing a jury: no one wants to risk hundreds of millions of dollars based on what 12 random people think. nVidia caved to Intel after building a Transmeta style VLIW chip that could run x86 assembly because a decade long patent battle would have been costly and invalidated patents on both sides.
I don't think the GPL anti-tivoization clause has much bearing there other than presumably you'd have to provide the full tool chain that resulted in the final gates - presumably this would affect companies producing actual chips the most since you couldn't have any propriety optimization or layout steps in producing the actual chip design, though also no DRM for FPGAs (is that even a thing?)
I think that’s the spirit of the GPL in a hardware context, but I don’t think it’s a given (by a long stretch) that courts would accept that argument.
A somewhat clearer case would be if you bought a device that implements a GPL licensed design in a FPGA. I think you could argue such devices cannot disable the reprogrammability of the FPGA.
If somehow this code is not in a firmware... No idea.
some of this design IS firmware - the lowest level bootstrap is encoded into an internal ROM - currently it's a very dumb bootstrap, a real implementation would boot from a number of possible sources. The sources are there on github.
All the ARM systems you can buy today have a similar embedded boot loader - almost all of them do not release that source, because it's the root of their secure boot chain.
IMHO this code should be public (but not the keys)
RMS wrote "I've considered selling exceptions acceptable since the 1990s, and on occasion I've suggested it to companies. Sometimes this approach has made it possible for important programs to become free software."