RE: [oc] legality of cores?!

[lior.shtram@flextronicssemi.com]

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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