Free PCI-bridge in VHDL for Spartan-IIE

[Torsten Lauter]

Our conditions:

Dear User,

thank you for your interest in our free VHDL PCI core.
The VHDL code is provided to you free of charge and we ask you not to pass
it on to any third parties.

The design has been tested and is expected to run smoothly.
However, no support or design guidance is guaranteed.
Its use is at your own risk and you take over full liability.

We reserve the right to name you/your company as reference user.
In turn, you ought to reference us as origin of the PCI core in the final
product description (e.g. manual, flyer etc.).

Code documentation is also at early stage, since the VHDL design is part of
a bigger project. Once there is time left in the project schedule, we will
round up the documentation.

To sum up the conditions:

- the code is provided free of charge
- no guarantee is given what so ever
- you agree to be named as reference user
- you must not pass the code on to third parties
- documentation is at early stage and support can not be guaranteed
- a reference (acknowledgement notice) to us as origin of the PCI core
must be included in the final product description

Finally, we would appreciate your feedback about functionality, application
scenarios, documentation and code add ons.

We ask you to agree to the conditions given above by means of an appropriate
email answer.
The VHDL PCI core will be emailed to you as soon as your compliance email
arrives.

Regards,

Torsten Lauter & Thomas Knoll

http://www.infotech.tu-chemnitz.de/~knoll/vhdl_pci_bridge/

"Rainer Buchty" <buchty@atbode100.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag news:c1kdrj$2h1f3$1@sunsystem5.informatik.tu-muenchen.de...

In article <c1kbg6$t67$3@newsreader.mailgate.org>,
Kevin Brace <k0evinbr1ace@m2ail.c3om> writes:
|> The no-academic research restriction is there because I want to charge
|> more than $100 for research-related academic use.

Let me get this straight. The use should be

- non-commercial
- non-profit
- non-academic research
- strictly personal purposes

So who the hell should license that core? I can understand that you rule
out
commercial use, I *could* understand if you ruled out industrial research.

But ruling out academic research because you want to charge *more* from
universities is reducing the number of potential customers pretty much to
zero.

Rainer

 

[Kevin Brace]

The $100 license for my PCI IP core is not intended for
prototyping of a commercial product.
Whoever wanting to use it in a commercial product should get a
commercial license which will cost several thousand dollars because
that's what other firms charge for a comparable PCI IP core, and that's
probably how much I need to get paid to run a business, and make a
living out of doing of it.
My intention for the $100 PCI IP core license is that hobbyists,
FPGA enthusiasts, and students simply cannot afford commercial PCI IP
cores which cost several thousand dollars, but they probably want a
commercial quality PCI IP core for something they can afford to pay.
Realistically speaking, I don't believe they are willing to pay anything
more than $100 for such a PCI IP core, so that's how much I can probably
charge.
From a business perspective, if I can get 100 users to pay $100, I will
earn $10,000, which is comparable to several commercial design wins.
The only problem is, as the number of licensees grow, the quality of
technical support will probably degrade because I will be have to deal
with more licensees.


Kevin Brace



Sander Vesik wrote:

Taavi Hein <hein@bps.co.ee> wrote:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:25:02 -0600, Kevin Brace <kev0inb1rac2e@m3ail.c4om
wrote:

* The licensee Will agree that the PCI IP core will be used only for
non-commercial, non-profit, non-academic research, and personal
purposes.

I could live with that restriction.

Really? You do realise that should you prototype something in the FPGA
that works with that core (whetveer directly or now) you are effectively
forced to *ALWAYS* start over from scratch if you want to use it in
some other project? This is the sucky part about such a core - you can't
get a replacement one and continue developing in that, be cause the moment
you try you may be suddenly retroactively screwed from start (notice the
word continue).

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

 

[Kevin Brace]

The $100 PCI IP core license is intended for hobbyists, FPGA
enthusiasts, Verilog learners, and students who want to make their own
PCI device for personal use.
I believe there are potentially several hundred people in the US who are
willing to pay $100 for the license.
It is my perception that people who do research can probably pay more
than a personal user, so I feel like I should charge more for a license
than a personal user.
If cost is that much of an issue, ask Xilinx because I read in this
newsgroup while back that they do sometimes donate their PCI IP core to
educational institutions.
I just don't intend to compete with a free one.


Kevin Brace



Rainer Buchty wrote:

In article <c1kbg6$t67$3@newsreader.mailgate.org>,

Let me get this straight. The use should be

- non-commercial
- non-profit
- non-academic research
- strictly personal purposes

So who the hell should license that core? I can understand that you rule out
commercial use, I *could* understand if you ruled out industrial research.

But ruling out academic research because you want to charge *more* from
universities is reducing the number of potential customers pretty much to
zero.

Rainer

 

[Rainer Buchty]

In article <c1kbg6$t67$3@newsreader.mailgate.org>,
Kevin Brace <k0evinbr1ace@m2ail.c3om> writes:
|> The no-academic research restriction is there because I want to charge
|> more than $100 for research-related academic use.

Let me get this straight. The use should be

- non-commercial
- non-profit
- non-academic research
- strictly personal purposes

So who the hell should license that core? I can understand that you rule out
commercial use, I *could* understand if you ruled out industrial research.

But ruling out academic research because you want to charge *more* from
universities is reducing the number of potential customers pretty much to
zero.

Rainer

 

[Taavi Hein]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:32:31 +0000 (UTC), Sander Vesik
<sander@haldjas.folklore.ee> wrote:

Taavi Hein <hein@bps.co.ee> wrote:

* The licensee Will agree that the PCI IP core will be used only for
non-commercial, non-profit, non-academic research, and personal
purposes.

I could live with that restriction.

Really?

Oops! I missed the "non-" in front of academic research... I'm sorry
Kevin, but I'll have to take back the above statement.

--
Taavi Hein,
....who sometimes tries to read too fast.

 

[Sander Vesik]

Kevin Brace <k0evinbr1ace@m2ail.c3om> wrote:

The $100 PCI IP core license is intended for hobbyists, FPGA
enthusiasts, Verilog learners, and students who want to make their own
PCI device for personal use.
I believe there are potentially several hundred people in the US who are
willing to pay $100 for the license.
It is my perception that people who do research can probably pay more
than a personal user, so I feel like I should charge more for a license
than a personal user.
If cost is that much of an issue, ask Xilinx because I read in this
newsgroup while back that they do sometimes donate their PCI IP core to
educational institutions.
I just don't intend to compete with a free one.

anyways, its up to you what you do. Seeing a marketplace of non-mass
production IP cores emerge would ceertainly be nice.

Kevin Brace

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

 

[David Brown]

"Kevin Brace" <k0evinbr1ace@m2ail.c3om> wrote in message
news:c1kbg6$t67$3@newsreader.mailgate.org...

The $100 license's US residency requirement is there because if
a licensee violates the license agreement of personal use, and uses the
PCI IP core in a commercial project in a foreign country, it is probably
going to be much harder to stop that than if it happened in this
country.

That's about as smart as PHB's who insist on buying commercial software and
avoiding open source software as they want to know who they can sue if they
have problems. I know web-based sales are more anonymous than traditional
shops, but isn't decending from "the customer is always right" to "the
customer is probably a thief" going a bit far?

If someone within the US decides to "steal" your core by using it in a
commercial product, or, heaven forbid, learning something by using it
(academic research being also forbidden), what exactly are you going to do
about it? The likely culprit will either be someone too small to be worth
bothering about since they would not have bought a full license anyway, or
big enough that lawyers fees and a court battle would cost far more than its
worth.

When you are selling high-price software (and presumably this applies to
your fully licensed core), you can afford to use tight legal licenses and
agreements that will be internationally enforcable. But for low-price
software available by download, you have to accept that there will be a
certain amount of illegal use of the software. That's a fact, and you won't
change it. You won't be able to stop it, and you won't be able to sue the
abusers. There are a few things you can do to stop this being a problem -
one is to make sure users can see the advantages of using the part legally,
such as better support, upgrades, restrictions in the evaluation parts
functionality (such as limited run time, as used by Altera's OpenCore
system, or lower performance), etc. Another is to widen your market - if
removing the "US-only" restriction gives you ten times as many paying
customers, would it matter if it also gave you a hundred times as many
pirates?

So please reconsider your attitude here, or perhaps stick to what you know
best (which is presumably VHDL design and pci cores and get someone else
to handle your sales and marketting.

 

[David Brown]

"Kevin Brace" <kev0inb1rac2e@m3ail.c4om> wrote in message
news:c1gk8c$v5k$1@newsreader.mailgate.org...

Hi Marius,

I believe it is theoretically much harder to enforce contractual
obligation like prohibition of redistribution or the requirement of
non-profit use if the licensee resides in a foreign country.

I believe that you have almost no possibility of realisticly enforcing your
contracts with people within the USA - for a start, how do you intend to
identify abusers of your software? Even if you find someone whom you can
prove has broken the contract, it would cost you far more time and money
that it is worth wasting. Your market would not be big enough that it would
be worth going after a few cheats as "examples to others".

There are many countries in the rest of the world - and in many of them, it
is much easier and cheaper to enforce such contracts than in the USA. And
for those countries where it would be harder - if your core is so much
better than other available cores or home-writen cores, and the
people/companies are so corrupt that they would take your core without
paying the full license, then they are going to be able to get hold of it
anyway so you might as well take their $100 rather than nothing.

Kevin Brace




Marius Vollmer wrote:

Kevin Brace <kev0inb1rac2e@m3ail.c4om> writes:

That restriction is there for legal reasons. If what I am dealing
with wasn't an IP core, there won't be such a restriction.

Now I'm curious, too. What _are_ those legal reasons, precisely?

--
GPG: D5D4E405 - 2F9B BCCC 8527 692A 04E3 331E FAF8 226A D5D4 E405