For Approval: Open Source Hardware License

[Wilson, Andrew]

Jamey Hicks wrote:

> From my re-reading of the OSI-certified open source licenses, 
> several of them could be used without change to protect copyrighted 
> source code written in hardware description languages such as Verilog
or 
> VHDL: MIT, BSD, CDDL, and EPL and GPL. None of these meets all the 
> requirements for our project. CDDL and EPL would fit our needs except 
> that at least one of the contributors, MIT, will not use a license
with 
> explicit patent grants. 

One is tempted to say that this is a localized MIT problem and not
evidence
of lack of fitness of a number of OSI-approved licenses for this
application.  One is also tempted to say that, in a pragmatic
sense as opposed to a license-theoretic sense, designing a
piece of hardware while relying on a license without an
explicit patent grant would constitute extremely risky behavior.

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center