[libre-riscv-dev] kazan | Dual license (#6)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

Sorry Jacob (and Tom), i don't want to sound harsh, however as you probably
guessed I have experienced significant hardship from poverty caused by
Corporations spongeing off of my expertise and taking advantage of my
commitment to ethical principles (always do good, never do harm), for over
20 years now.

In order to make this Libre SoC we need to use BSD licenses because any
other type of license would be unacceptable to Foundries. They would never
release their cell libraries under the GPL.

That means that the chances of a Corporation once again spongeing off of
these efforts is extremely high and under the BSD License there is
absolutely no obligation to compensate the authors of the copyrighted work.

The BSD License was after all designed by a University, during a naive and
very trusting period of Computing History.

If the software driver is ALSO under the BSD license we are doubly screwed.

The only possible way that we have to prevent spongeing (taking our
efforts, making money and not paying us) and also letting users have
control of their systems is to keep the Kazan driver under the LGPL.

If static linking has to be quotes sacrificed quotes because it is quotes a
little bit inconvenient quotes that to me is an acceptable tradeoff.

The complainers may always either create their own driver or find a
solution such as releasing the source code of the proprietary executable.

Or pay us.

L.




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