[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:43:14 +0000, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article
> <69202524-5c1a-425b-9896-f72ebd404171 at l5g2000vbc.googlegroups.com>,
> 	johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk writes:
> > 
> > The other thing to note is that at least one reasonably recent SPARC
> > chip design is released under GPL,
> 
> How does one "copyright" hardware?  I thought that was what patents were
> for. I can't even begin to imagine how you could apply the GPL to a CPU
> design.  This whole GPL thing just gets sillier every day.

I haven't followed the GPLed SPARC processor, but they could eg. put the 
VHDL stuff under GPL. That is about as good as source code, describing 
all of the CPU.

MfG, JBG