[Arm-netbook] FSF-Endorseable Processor

[Scott Sullivan]

On 12/05/2012 01:58 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
>>> what is the business logic?
[...]
> The cynic in me says they'll never release their VHDL core without heavy
> NDA protection because if they did, someone from Tera (or Cray) would
> recoginize code they wrote.
>
> This is also my theory about why all these IP cores come with stupid
> NDAs and stupid software licensing.. They are all just ripping each
> other off and just want to hide this fact from the vulture capitalists
> and shareholders.

Rob Bishop of the Raspberry Pi foundation (and formerly Broadcom) was in 
Toronto for a talk which I co-organized. The question of why SoC vendors 
don't release the source to their circuit designs came up and he had the 
following comments.

1) Software is covered by the domain of Copyright Law, where Hardware 
primarily the domain of Patent Law. The latter has far few protections 
as you can sue on the concepts, where as the former you can only go 
after the copying of an implementation.

2) It's not so much that the vendor's are ripping each other off, it 
more that an sufficiently clever patent lawyer can claim some violation. 
Claims then can be pursued and used to damage competition, whether they 
are valid or not.

So what this boils down to is that law governing the hardware has a much 
broader attack surface then software does. In this scenario, stealth or 
obscurity (NDA, proprietary) is an advantage, by keeping access way from 
enemy lawyers that would abuse the information.

So while from a moral or ethical point of view, releasing the source to 
the hardware design is the "right" thing for the long term. In practice 
is not in a business interest as it means 10s of millions in lawsuits 
that won't be make up in 10s of millions of sales. This is also true if 
they release the source before they have re-coped the millions of 
dollars invested in testing and making the hardware. When transistors 
cost many fractions of a penny, that a lot volume you have to make to 
get that investment back.

-- 
Scott Sullivan