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eBook details

• Title: Protecting Open Source Hardware?
• Author : Law and Technology Journal of Information
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Computers,Books,Computers & Internet,Professional & Technical,Law,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 54 KB

Description

Protection for software produced under the GPL is well known and shown to be successful, based upon copyright protection and licensing. It is not so obvious that the same model can be moved over to hardware, since historically engineers have been allowed to reverse engineer products at will, so long as they are not protected by patents etc. The heart of the problem, so far as opens source hardware goes, is that the open source philosophy relies on the key principle that you are free to use my work, but only if you subsequently share your derived work, so the benefit continues. It relies on a suitable legal framework to enforce this "contract". Current developments in hardware are moves away from the traditional 'Von Neumann' architecture to multi-core, parallel processing forms and also system-on-a-chip approaches. These are very complex and difficult to produce and this is where companies seek to make money. Protection is important since special purpose chips are now part of almost every device being manufactured and markets can be large. It is not clear how best protection for these can be enabled--earlier forms such as 'mask protection' are no longer so relevant when the whole process of design and manufacture is through special purpose languages.

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