ALERT -- IEEE stinks up the house! [Was Re: [vhdl-200x-ft] New version of VHDL code]

David,

You should immediately, and without reservation, place your own
copyright on every single one of those files which you personally
created. Especially the floating point work developed for both Verilog
and VHDL.

IMMEDIATELY (with emphasis)

Then repost them on the public, non-ieee EDA.ORG web server as a giant
zip file (or even better post them to Sourceforge). As far as I know,
you haven't published the code directly to the listserver and EDA.ORG
isn't owned by the IEEE. Let the IEEE lawyers come forward. I think they
would promply loose their case and perhaps 50% of the IEEE membership
after they are found guilty of attempting to steal your hard work for
their own profit.

These are not a work made for hire and the IEEE has absolutely no rights
in them. If this Claudio Stanziola person continues with this
reprehensible line of Bulls**t then I think every single one of us
should drop our IEEE membership on the spot, write editorials to all the
major EE magazines, and generally scream FOUL at the top of our lungs.

In the event that Mr. Stanziola believes me to be wrong on this point
then I challenge him to publish the contract with your signature on it
stating that you are developing materials for them in a work made for
hire and have turned over copyrights to them for your intellectual property.

--
Aspen Logic, Inc.
by: Tim Davis, President
David Bishop wrote:
> Peter Ashenden wrote:
>
>> David and colleagues,
>>
>> I received a note from Claudio Stanziola, the IEEE-SA's IP and legal 
>> person,
>> regarding the posting of the package files.  He indicated that public
>> posting of IEEE copyrighted material is against IEEE policy, and 
>> requested
>> that the material be kept in a protected area.
>
>
> I feel very strongly that these packages NEED to be part of the public
> domain.  If they are not, all of our hard work on VHDL-200X-FT won't
> get used.  The reason that it took "numeric_std" so long to be
> adopted was because vendors did not have free access to the source code.
>
>> I've asked him for clarification of what kinds of material should be
>> protected and to whom the material should be accessible.  I'm still 
>> awaiting
>> a reply.
>
>
> Please.   I feel that I have made a major mistake in donating the
> fixed point and floating point packages if this is the case.
>
>> Meanwhile, please be aware that we may be required to take action to 
>> limit
>> access in some way.  I'll advise as soon as I can.
>
>
> Limiting access may make it impossible to actually verify these packages.
> I have several thousand lines of test vectors, just for the updates to
> the current packages, and they are not exhaustive.  We will need to make
> them publicly available not only for debugging, but to get them used and
> our new standard accepted.
>