> 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.
IANAL, but I agree with you: that's my understanding. > 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). There are severals pieces of the compiled test bench: the testbench in itself and the ghdl runtime code (and also possibly some VHDL libraries), so there are severals copyrights holders. The license of the binary must agree with the licenses of each part. (again IANAL and I don't know well the law about aggregate works). > If Tristan would not > own copyright over my testbench binary, there is no way for him to > enforce any particular license terms. Yes, but currently I own the copyright of the GHDL runtime. So you cannot decide by your own the license of the binary; you have to comply with the license of the runtime (again IANAL). > > 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. IANAL, but I don't think it must be under the terms of the GPL. You have to respect the GPL, but I think it could be more liberal. For example, you could use BSD-like license for your design, and distribute both a binary and the sources. > 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. I agree. That's why I think the GPL license of the runtime is not a real issue (or, there are more important issues). Tristan. _______________________________________________ Ghdl-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/ghdl-discuss
