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RE: [oc] legality of cores?!
Hi All,
I can imaging that the law is different in US and EU. Maybe it is also possible
to change things about the clone to make it different. It is possible to search
for US/EU patents on the web by company name. (EU is possible to download full
patent text and pictures). If the project has non-commercial educational
character they won't sue you most probably.
Dani
Am Fre, 01 Jun 2001 schrieben Sie:
> Hi All,
>
> Kent is right about the patents. I work for Flextronics and we have a lot of
> interest in OpenCores and wish to use these core in the future for commertial
> purposes. We are considering making a lawyer look at these issues with the cores
> available on Opencores. I would consider an ARM clone a very high risk in this
> perspective especialy as ARM is so much motivated against clones - I am sure
> they will find something if they realy look for it. Also, the fact that AMD
> makes an Intel clone does not by any way means that it is legal. It might mean
> that it is legal, but it might also be that Intel for some reason does not want
> to sue AMD.
>
> If you are looking for an ARM clone for your projects, why don't you consider
> the OpenRISC available here. We would realy appreciate any help you can
> contribute to the development efforts, and we do mean to come up with a full
> package including all the nice development and debug features you are used too.
>
> regards,
>
> Lior
>
>
>
>
> Kent Dahlgren
> <kent@praesum.c To: cores@opencores.org
> om> cc:
> Sent by: Subject: RE: [oc] legality of cores?!
> owner-cores@ope
> ncores.org
>
>
> 06/01/2001
> 01:58 AM
> Please respond
> to cores
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At 03:27 PM 5/31/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >Hello,
> >
> >Jim, you ask a good question. However, I don't believe it is illegal to use
> >information freely available in order to reverse engineer a processor. As
> >long as no inside private information from ARM is used, it should be legal.
> >AMD obviously makes a clone of the Intel processors and gets away with it.
> >But it should be checked out as I am not a Lawyer (thank God).
>
> Hi Jeff
>
> The rub is that if you infringe on any patents they may have on the
> implementation it doesn't matter where you got the information. This
> is the reason the Lexra doesn't support the unaligned load/store
> instructions that MIPS has a patent on.
>
> Sorry ;-(
>
> Kent
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