c4m-pdk-gf180mcu 0.0.4

gf180mcu as PDKMaster based PDK

This is pre-alpha development of PDKMaster based PDK for open source GF180MCU process. Proper README still needs to be written.

Licensing Rationale

Open source projects and it's surrounding community can only strive when improvements to the code or application of the code itself are released to the public and allowed to be used by them. Copyleft type license are using the licensing terms to guarantee this actually happens and no party uses a 'take-but-don't-give-back' approach. The GNU Aferro General Public License V3.0 is used as main license for the code in this project as it is a copyleft type license that is also applicable to cloud services without binary distribution of the code.

One of the problems with a strict copyleft license is that it can introduce incompatibilities with code released under other open source licenses. In order to improve compatibility and thus also reusablity the code in this repo is multi-licensed. Multi-licensing under established open source licenses was preferred over custom extension of licenses.

The GNU General Public License V2.0 was added as optional license in order to allow derived code not to be bound by the anti-tivoization clauses introduced in the GNU General Public License Version 3. The latter was not deemed necessary for this project and the addition was done to increase compatibility with some corporate policies.

The CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal is included as it is a copyleft license specifically targeted for hardware but incompatible with the GPL licenses.

The Apache License Version 2.0 is included to maximize compatiblity with existing open source code. One is supposed to not use it to avoid having to release one's own derived code to the public. If you plan development of a project in a proprietary way, one is kindly asked to not derive one's code from this project's code.

In future the list of allowed licenses may be reduced. A reason could be that such an action is deemed necessary by the project maintainers to encourage open sourcing of derived code.

Analog to how the object files and the executables generated by the gcc compiler are not necessarily goverened by the GPL license, the multi-licensing applies only to code derived from code in this repository. Output files generated through the use of the code in this repository are not by default bound to the multi-licensing requirements of this project's code.