[En-Nut-Discussion] RFC: License Considerations

[Harald Kipp]

Hi all,

With the recent additions of new CPUs, our contributors make use of existing libraries provided by the chip manufacturers. Naturally these manufacturers want to protect their investment and limit the use of this code to their own products. As far as I can see, there seems to be no problem using the code for commercial applications. On the other hand, the expressed limitation make them incompatible with the BSD license.

You can find the recent STM license here
http://www.ethernut.de/arc/software_license_agreement_liberty_v2.pdf

And here's the Freescale license
http://www.ethernut.de/arc/Freescale%20Software%20License.pdf

IMHO, banning all non-BSD from Nut/OS would be quite stupid. A lot of code would have to be rewritten and with the limited resources of our small community we may never see many more ports to other platforms. It's OK for me to include code with other licenses, as long as the user has been made aware of this. For example, for some time we have the Helix MP3 decoder included. The user, who wants to use this, has to explicitly enable the RealNetworks RPSL/RCSL option in the Configurator to include this code into the Nut/OS libraries.

Your opinions are most welcome.

Regards,

Harald