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Lead developer here. The license is LGPLv3; sorry for any confusion. The Aerospace Corporation specifically wanted a weak copyleft license for SatCat5. i.e.,
by ooterness 4y ago
Lead developer here. The license is LGPLv3; sorry for any confusion.
The Aerospace Corporation specifically wanted a weak copyleft license for SatCat5. i.e., If you use it as-is in a larger design, great; if you modify it, please make those improvements available to the wider community. A full GPL license would have imposed copyleft obligations on the rest of the end-user design, and we felt that was too much of a barrier for industry adoption. Our intent is to capture improvements to SatCat5 itself and only those improvements.
Others here have mentioned that terms like "compilation unit" are ambiguous at best in an FPGA or ASIC design, and I fully agree. Sadly, there just weren't a lot of widely-known, weak-copyleft options when we were making that decision in mid-2019.
The good news is this isn't set in stone and it can be changed. CERN-OHL-W 2.0 wasn't around when we first published this in 2019, but I'll take a close look and see if that's a better fit.