Say I have a C/C++ software licensed under GPL that gets converted into hardware design. By this conversion I mean that the exact functionality of the original software is being programmed into an FPGA. Does the resulting software that will load into an FPGA to make it work classify as a derivative work of the original C/C++ code?
My guess would be it is a derivative work since it retains all the design and is just rewritten into a different (programming) language.
The type of conversion I mean can be nicely seen on this project: OpenCV StereoBM to FPGA. Here both the original and resulting projects are licensed under permissive licenses - since the original is not copylefted my question does not apply here.
There may be two main ways how to "port" an application to HW design - by "automatic" code generation or by manually writing the code by hand. I want to cover both these approaches.
