On 2014-01-12, [email protected] wrote: > > To be clear, we are talking about the copyright of GHDL output, > > right? > > I am not a lawyer, but no, we are talking about the license.
Agreed, but license and copyright are very closely related. Perhaps you already understand this, but many people don't. Therefore I feel an obsessive urge to explain it a bit further: Copyright is the legal force behind licenses. Copyright gives exclusive power to the author to decide what may or may not be done with the software and its derivatives. A license then relaxes some of the copyright constraints, allowing use and redistribution under certain conditions. Copyright is a purely restrictive force. A copyrighted work without license may only be distributed by its author. If GHDL had no license, I would not be allowed to distribute it, with or without source code. A license is a purely permissive force. The only reason why I am bound to the terms of the GPL is because otherwise copyright would prevent me from distributing GHDL at all. Without copyright, the license has no power. We were discussing the question of whether or not the terms of the GPL apply to the compiled testbench. This ultimately comes down to the question of whether or not Tristan owns copyrights of the compiled testbench (because it is a derived work from GHDL). If Tristan would not own copyright over my testbench binary, there is no way for him to enforce any particular license terms. > IANAL, but copyright is a different issue than license. If you > redistribute ./testbench, you need to comply with the GPL. Roughly > speaking you must also redistribute the sources of your design. Agreed. If I distribute the ./testbench, I must do so under the terms of the GPL and include complete VHDL source code. However in many practical cases there are other copyright holders (e.g. Xilinx) who do not allow distribution of their VHDL code under GPL. The logical consequence is that I can not legally distrbute the ./testbench at all. Joris. _______________________________________________ Ghdl-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/ghdl-discuss
