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STMicroelectronics / STM32CubeH7

STM32Cube MCU Full Package for the STM32H7 series - (HAL + LL Drivers, CMSIS Core, CMSIS Device, MW libraries plus a set of Projects running on all boards provided by ST (Nucleo, Evaluation and Discovery Kits))
https://www.st.com/en/embedded-software/stm32cubeh7.html
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Unclear software licensing #205

Closed sebhub closed 2 years ago

sebhub commented 2 years ago

For example, the file Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32H7xx/Include/stm32h723xx.h contains this license header:

  * Copyright (c) 2019 STMicroelectronics.
  * All rights reserved.
  *
  * This software is licensed under terms that can be found in the LICENSE file
  * in the root directory of this software component.
  * If no LICENSE file comes with this software, it is provided AS-IS.

However, there is no LICENSE file in the repository. The closest license file is Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32H7xx/License.md which states that this file is under BSD-3-Clause license. This contradicts the top level license overview in LICENSE.md which states:

| Component                       | Copyright                                             | License                                      |
|:------------------------------- |:----------------------------------------------------- |:-------------------------------------------- |
| CMSIS                           | ARM Limited                                           | Apache License 2.0                           |
| CMSIS Device                    | ARM Limited - STMicroelectronics                      | Apache License 2.0                           |

Could you please clarify this.

In addition, this software is intended to be used by applications using STMicroelectronics chips. It may be integrated in project-specific repositories. In order to manage open source software licenses, the software industry established the Software Data Package Exchange standard which is an international open standard (ISO/IEC 5962:2021). It would be really nice if STMicroelectronics would support this and add SPDX license identifiers to the source files.

ALABSTM commented 2 years ago

Hi @sebhub,

Thank you for having drawn our attention on that. Indeed, the applicable license terms for the CMSIS Device are the Apache 2.0 ones. This will be fixed.

Regarding the LICENSE file mentioned in the license paragraph on top of the source and header files, it is the Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32H7xx/License.md as you guessed. This file is applicable to all files inside the Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32H7xx folder.

Regarding the SPDX identifiers, the follow-up will be made via this thread.

With regards,

ALABSTM commented 2 years ago

ST Internal Reference: 126404

ALABSTM commented 2 years ago

Fixed in commit 0c3a06c18bd2a87b006a84f997f2b0b56d97a113

sebhub commented 2 years ago

Actually, this is not what I intended. Why did you change the license of this code from BSD-3-Clause to Apache License 2.0? The Apache License 2.0 has an attribution clause which makes it difficult to handle if you include the code in third-party projects.

ALABSTM commented 2 years ago

Hi @sebhub,

Actually, our CMSIS Device components are licensed under Apache 2.0 terms. I simply updated the content of the file to be compliant with the intended licensing.

With regards,

sebhub commented 2 years ago

Ok, this is a step backwards. Please consider to license your own code under BSD-3-Clause.