Re: Need advice on NDA

[Michael Meissner <meissner at cygnus dot com>]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 10:09:50AM +0200, Marek Michalkiewicz wrote:
> I'm currently working on some gcc and binutils improvements for
> the AVR target, mainly support for new (not yet available) chips
> that add a few new instructions.  While the necessary information
> is already available in the published AVR instruction set manual,
> it would be nice to be able to do some testing on real hardware.
> 
> Atmel asks me to sign an NDA if I want to receive early samples
> of these new chips for testing.  Now, I need to make sure this NDA
> doesn't prevent me from submitting gcc changes.  I know that some
> people here have experience dealing with this stuff (it has been
> done in the past) and legal paperwork in general, but I don't know
> exactly who is the best person to ask, so I'm sending this to the
> gcc mailing list.  Atmel asked me to not publicly post the text of
> the NDA (they don't want to "find it somewhere on the web"), but
> they say it's OK if I show it to someone for review.
> 
> So if you think you can help me, please reply and I'll send you
> (private e-mail) the text of the NDA for you to review.  Yes,
> I know NDAs are evil, but without it I'll probably have to wait
> a year or so before I can test the changes on released chips.

I am not qualified to judge the text of a NDA in terms of legal matters, but
the general prinicipal Cygnus (and now Red Hat) used in the past for NDA's is
to only sign time limited NDA's (ie, you can't give out information for a
specific amount of time or until the chip is released, after that there are no
limits).  This would mean you probably wouldn't be able to contribute the AVR
changes until after the NDA expires.  For example, the D30V port that I
recently contributed was under a limited NDA while the compiler was being
developed.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
Work:	  meissner@redhat.com		phone: +1 978-486-9304
Non-work: meissner@spectacle-pond.org	fax:   +1 978-692-4482