Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by herogreen 2192 days ago
Also newsworthy: Lattice drops recent EULA clause forbidding fpga bitstream reverse engineering https://hackaday.com/2020/06/06/lattice-drops-eula-clause-fo... therefore 2020 could be a milestone for open FPGA toolchains!
4 comments

A developer of Symbiflow toolchain once described Lattice Semi as very friendly and cooperative towards them [1]. I was wondering why they suddenly changed their attitude. It may have been a clause that they introduced without giving much thought. Happy to see that at least one vendor has the right idea about tooling.

[1] https://youtu.be/0se7kNes3EU?t=1367

Hackaday comments were hypothesizing that they outsource tool development to some other company.
Why would they change an EULA clause for that?
To signal potential open source contributors that there is no danger of being sued for their work. Too many vendors have used the fact or even just the accusation of reverse-engineering or other non-EULA-compliant behaviour to suppress OSS.
That's a valid reason. But not what I asked.

I don't see a connection to "outsource tool development to some other company".

If I commission some work from another company, this company doesn't receive, modify or extend my software under the standard EULA. They do so under our contract.

The idea was that some outside company had a say in what went into the EULA.
I initially misunderstood this headline to mean the opposite: I took "drops" to mean "introduces", which is the opposite of the intended meaning -- "withdraws". Not sure where I got this non-mainstream meaning of "to drop".
People do talk about “dropping” an album to indicate it’s being released. Your confusion is somewhat understandable. English is hard. :(
similarly, dropping off supplies or deliveries -- maybe where they are dropped from a great height via parachute out of a plane. Or dropped off by a delivery truck.

"Lattice drops recent EULA clause" would be easier to interpret if the initial and final altitude of the clause was specified. If the initial altitude was unusually high, it might indicate that the clause was being introduced via parachute. If the initial altitude was comparable to the altitude of an object being held in a person's hands, and the final altitude ground level, this would suggest the clause being discarded or removed.

Haha, that made me laugh out loud. "Lattice drops recent EULA clause from 1.5 meter height".
It's what most hip clothing brands do to launch merch. Look at Supreme as an early example. Artificially limited stock, released like Black Friday. Scarcity ups the coolness and bragging factor. It's somewhat odd though many times - take Supreme example - the retail costs don't actually match the demand (they could charge higher) not supply side and a large re-sale market opens (even stockx.com a real market with order book)
This is amazing!

But of course it would be even better if they would just publish the documentation.

I posted it here a few days ago, as I found the news quite interesting !

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23440907