Brew your own SPARC: SPARC IP Core SCSLed

Tekmage writes "Sun has just announced the release of it's SPARC IP core under their Community Source License. " The dialogue over whether or not the SCSL is a good license continues, but it's better nothing, IMHO. Interesting move on their part, especially given IBM's recent moves with the PowerPC designs.

Comments

It's much better than nothing!

[brad.hill]

For years, one of the biggest arguments from the hacker community against the harsh prosecution of people like Kevin Mitnick has been the idea that looking at source code doesn't harm a company. The argument is thus: "If you're not using it to compete against them, they suffer no harm; it was just curiosity and a desire to learn."

Finally a company, Sun, is doing exactly what hackers have been demanding all these years: letting them have a look at interesting technology, to learn from and satisfy their curiosity.

This isn't about open source evangelism and your imagined right to free computer hardware. It's about giving students and other interested people a tool to learn from, in a way that doesn't hurt Sun's business.

Nobody loses anything from this. People interested in microprocessor design gain. Why are you complaining?

If you expect Sun to license people to compete against it with it's own technology, you're living in a dream world. It's not going to hurt the GPL to have more information available in the world, and with your hypothetical binary choice between GPL and total secrecy, most companies would choose total secrecy. Be glad some have chosen to imagine a third alternative that *is* much better than nothing.

Re:It's much better than nothing!

[MoxCamel]

You wrote:
Finally a company, Sun, is doing exactly what hackers have been demanding all these years: letting them have a look at interesting technology, to learn from and satisfy their curiosity.

I seriously doubt Sun's motivation is to satisfy hacker's curiosity. I see their motivation as twofold: 1) Capitalize on the open source craze, and act as if they're a part of it. 2) Capitalize on the sheer body-count of open source developers to make their product better. Number 1) is just deceptive. The license doesn't sponsor a "community," it seeks to take the works of others and keep it as their own. Number 2) isn't necessarily bad in it's own right, it's how companies like Red Hat make money. But Sun wants to keep volunteer work as their own. They don't want to "share with their neighbor" (as RMS would say). That's not right, and it's the whole reason that licenses like the SCSL are a bad thing.

This isn't about open source evangelism and your imagined right to free computer hardware. It's about giving students and other interested people a tool to learn from, in a way that doesn't hurt Sun's business.

I think you mean "free computer software?" But again, Sun isn't releasing this as a learning tool. Now, if you learn from perusing it, great. But if you contribute to it, you have just given up your rights to software you created. You get nothing. You have no control over your work. And worst of all, you have no control over who benefits from your work. You work has effectively been shackled by Sun. Now, had you spent your time developing for a free/open source project, many, many more people could benefit from it.

Nobody loses anything from this. People interested in microprocessor design gain. Why are you complaining?

Everybody but Sun loses from this. Because every line of code contributed to the code base is sucked into Sun, never to be shared with anybody. If you contribute a nifty routine to a SCSL project, it can't be copied into a GPL work. It can't be shared.

Closed licenses that pretend to be open are, at best, misleading. They lull you into a false sense that you are "contributing." But instead, it takes away from you. If you want to contribute to the Sun codebase, at least go work for them and get paid for it. But don't for one second think that you're contributing to the community. You're not, and it's worse than that. You're taking away your talents and skills from a real community that could use them. And that's worse than nothing at all.

License Madness

[SteveX]

Someone should write up a License Generator webpage.

Have it pick an acronym at random using a database of buzzwords ("open", "community", "free", "public", etc) and have sliders for the level of openness you want, of protection for your source, your patents, or whatever else it is that people write up their own licenses for...

Community Source License *NOT* better than nothing

[MoxCamel]

The Community source is not "better [than] nothing." Given that it's not completely open:

1) If people adopt and develop under SCSL, Sun has no incentive to open the license further.

2) If people don't adopt SCSL, Sun is likely to drop further free/open source involvement.

Either way, SCSL is a bad thing.

Richard Stallman on "Free Hardware"

[Skeezix]

Here is a link to an article by Richard Stallman that I'm sure a lot of you have read. It talks about "free hardware designs and why he sees no social imperative for free hardware as he does for free software. I personally agree that there isn't the social imperative for free hardware designs, but at the same time I think free hardware designs would be very beneficial to corporations, students, and the consumer...in fact the consumer would most likely benefit the most since there would be an accelerated rate of development and competition (just as free software breeds this type of acceleration--look no further than the KDE and GNOME camps for an excellent example of this).

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org

How is this different from their move last March?

[EngrBohn]

They made the announcement back in March. I remember talking to one of my professors about the research & academic opportunities it presented.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /03/02/1133216.shtml
Christopher A. Bohn

CSL

[Compuser]

Sun's license may be better for hardware than software, since hardware doesn't "want to be free" :).

Just a little note

[aheitner]

The MicroSPARCII is not a particularly exciting processor. It's the chip that was used in the SS5, and it ran up to 170MHz in the last SS5 offered. It's not designed for SMP (Turbo- and HyperSPARCs did that in SS10 and SS20). It's a 32bit chip, a bit faster at floating point than an equivalent Pentium. (it's also the chip in my SPARCBook 3 :).

So don't expect cheap high powered crazy Suns floating around soon. Sun wants people using MSII's where they're now using R4xxx's and ARMcores and m68k's in PDAs.

An advantage is of course Linux already runs fine on it :) But it does on the ARM, Motorola and MIPS chips too.

Re:Just a little note

[stange]

This is for the MicroSparc IIep, which is an embedded processor; it includes support for the PCI bus, for example.

It wasn't used in the Sparc 5, that was the Microsparc II, with an SBUS controller. The fastest speed of the Microsparc II was 110 Mhz.

The TurboSparc ran at 170 Mhz in the Sparc 5.

The Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 used the SuperSparc and the HyperSparc. The SuperSparc was the first V8 architecture Sparc processor from Sun.

It is expected that Sun will also be releasing the same information for the UltraSparc processors in the near future.

The point that is being lost here is that the IIep is a current product that is used in embedded solutions. Sun want's people to use this chip, and in an effort to increase sales, is releasing this information. For those who are unaware, the embedded cpu market is vastly larger than the PC/Workstation market.

Re:Getting better - Creative Labs...

[jmalicki]

Microsoft estimates that 65% of NT crashes are due to third-party drivers. Why is this significant? In Linux, there are VERY few non-GPL'd drivers, but if the trend increases, then there will be a LOT of binary-only drivers for Linux making it almost as unstable as NT.

No driver at all may very well be better than one that is not open source, as it prevents people from developing their own GPL'd drivers, which will work more correctly and be more stable in the long run.

This reminds me of...

[Yarn]

'Build your own SPARC' in an absolutely ANCIENT issue of Byte I have lying around somewhere. I seem to recall it also had the first ever local bus PC, a discussion about OOPS vs DDE, a bit on Unix fragmentation and a sort of SGML tutorial. I'll have to dig it out and read it again.

Sun lied in press conference

[Bruce Perens]

Bell [of HP] characterized Sun's CSL -- for both hardware and software products -- as "an obvious attempt to gain the advantages of open sourcing without the obligations."

At least someone in the industry catches that.

I found out that Sun did say the SCSL was an Open Source license at the StarOffice press conference. Of course, that's a bald-faced lie. A reporter who was there, and seems to be a responsible person, asserted that fact to me in private mail. I'd like to know if they did the same thing at this most recent press conference.

I wonder if they're just trying to buy the idea of Open Source by releasing so much almost-Open-Source software that they confuse people into believing that what Sun does is really Open Source?

I personally am not going to have anything more to do with Sun and its products while they insist on foisting the SCSL on the world. I'd suggest that people who maintain GPL-ed SPARC port of Linux and the SPARC port of GCC consider if they are really helping the cause of free software.

Thanks

Bruce Perens