Stellarisware License vs. Open Projects

[hvontres 22]

Just a heads up to people considering using Stellarisware for their Open Projects (like Project of the Month):

 

While drivelib is now released under a BSD licence, the other libraries and all of the examples fall under the original Stellarisware Licence which includes this rather ominous passage:

 

g. Restrictions. You shall maintain the source code versions of the Licensed

Materials under password control protection and shall not disclose such source

code versions of the Licensed Materials, or any derivative thereof, to any

person other than your employees and contractors whose job performance requires

access. You shall not use the Licensed Materials with a processing device

manufactured by or for an entity other than TI, and you agree that any such

unauthorized use of the Licensed Materials is a material breach of this

Agreement. Except as expressly provided in this Agreement, you shall not copy,

publish, disclose, display, provide, transfer or make available the Licensed

Materials to any third party and you shall not sublicense, transfer, or assign

the Licensed Materials or your rights under this Agreement to any third party.

You shall not mortgage, pledge or encumber the Licensed Materials in any way.

You shall not (i) incorporate, combine, or distribute the Licensed Materials,

or any derivative thereof, with any Public Software, or (ii) use Public

Software in the development of any derivatives of the Licensed Materials, each

in such a way that would cause the Licensed Materials, or any derivative

thereof, to be subject to all or part of the license obligations or other

intellectual property related terms with respect to such Public Software,

including but not limited to, the obligations that the Licensed Materials, or

any derivative thereof, incorporated into, combined, or distributed with such

Public Software (x) be disclosed or distributed in source code form, be

licensed for the purpose of making derivatives of such software, or be

redistributed free of charge, contrary to the terms and conditions of this

Agreement, (y) be used with devices other than TI Devices, or (z) be otherwise

used or distributed in a manner contrary to the terms and conditions of this

Agreement. As used in this Section 2(g), "Public Software" means any software

that contains, or is derived in whole or in part from, any software distributed

as open source software, including but not limited to software licensed under

the following or similar models: (A) GNU's General Public License (GPL) or

Lesser/Library GPL (LGPL), ( the Artistic License (e.g., PERL), © the

Mozilla Public License, (D) the Netscape Public License, (E) the Sun Community

Source License (SCSL), (F) the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISL),

(G) the Apache Server license, (H) QT Free Edition License, (I) IBM Public

License, and (J) BitKeeper.

 

This seems to preclude us from posting modified Ti-Example code on this board.

 

While I can see why TI wants to protect the library code, it would have been nice to use a less restrictive license for the Examples.

[bluehash 1,581]

What if we dont touch/modify the driverlib, use it as-is.

I know that they don't recommend/wish to run their library on other processors. As far as it is on the Stellaris, it's fine.

 

The lines that you posted above does discourage posting the driverlib on git or any public repository. That will really break a project if someone downloads it. They will also have to download the big Stellarisware exe as a separate download.

[hvontres 22]

Actually, driverlib and the include files are now BSD licensed. The problem comes with grlib,usblib and most importantly ALL of the example code provided by ti, including the startup code. So if you want to be able to post the project, one cannot use the Ti examples as a starting point.

[Rickta59 589]

It does seem problematic

[igor 163]

One odd thing is that though the driverlib is supposedly under BSD license,

the linker files and the makefiles are still under the old license.

 

They still have the bit about "You may not combine this software with "viral" open-source software in order to form a larger program."

 

Thus not only can you not use the example linker files to create your own projects with such

licenses, you might have to create your own linker file, build file, etc. in order

to generate a copy of the driverlib that you could use with such projects.

 

Particularly problematic here is the linker file - how do you make something that will have the

same effect but will be substantially different enough to not be copyright infringement?

Any suggestions?

 

Would be handy if we could come up with and share linker files and startup code files that are open source and sufficiently different that they would not run risk of violating TI's copyright.

 

In another thread there was discussion of CMSIS vs Stellaris libraries. Are the CMSIS libraries

more open source friendly? Do they cover areas like USB?

[igor 163]

Just saw where somebody has made open source linker and startup files.

Looks like just for Stellaris Launchpad at the moment, but can probably be adapted to other Stellaris processors.

 

http://scompoproject...low-level-code/

 

Github code at

https://github.com/s...ad-template-gcc

[dellwoodbu 1]

Igor,

 

TI noticed the oversight on the driverlib makefiles and posted new ones here...

 

 

http://e2e.ti.com/su...1/t/230468.aspx

 

Also the Energia folks appear to have worked with TI to resolve some of the other issues...

 

https://github.com/e...f/startup_gcc.c  Looks like a TI startup file with TI's BSD License on top.

 

The linker script energia is using is their own. But may be helpful https://github.com/e...lm4f/lm4fcpp.ld

 

 

I posted this same information here in another forum  http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/327-stellaris-launchpad-gcc-makefile-startup-file-and-linker-script-bsd/?p=1661