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chettrick / discobsd

2.11BSD-based Unix-like OS for STM32 and PIC32 Microcontrollers
http://www.DiscoBSD.org
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
182 stars 16 forks source link

Support for atsamd51, cpu 120mhz 256kb ram, 1mb flash. See: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/ATSAMD51G18A Thanks #1

Open vslinuxdotnet opened 1 year ago

chettrick commented 1 year ago

Hello, thanks for your suggestion about adding support for the SAM D51.

From my cursory view, Microchip's software offer for that chip series is licensed as either Apache 2.0 or a BSD-like license with an exclusive-use clause. Such non-free licensed software, including software licensed under GPL, LGPL, EPL, CDDL, and so on, will not be included in DiscoBSD.

I will leave this Issue open, in the hope that a suitably licensed chip and board support package is discovered or independently developed. I appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks, Christopher Hettrick

amarkee commented 1 year ago

For clarification on the license, is the Apache 2.0 a problem? The device headers and linker scripts appear to be Apache 2.0 while the drivers (Harmony or ASF) are under the exclusive-use clause. Harmony and ASF aren't worth the time, so not being able to use them wouldn't be a big loss. This could be a port I could take on once I familiarize myself with the code base a bit more.

chettrick commented 1 year ago

@amarkee Yes, the Apache 2.0 license is a problem. See https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html and the rationale under Specific Cases for Apache.

DiscoBSD adopts, in general, the OpenBSD approach to software licensing.

The big issue that will be faced in the future is that the CMSIS files from Arm for Cortex-M33 devices and newer devices are also Apache 2.0, and no BSD-style license exists for them that I could find.

For clarity, there currently are issues with the licensing of some utilities inherited from RetroBSD, such as the virus editor and lcc. A licensing audit will be performed once the codebase is in a stable form that is receptive for a sort of Ports Collection for transferring the third party utilities to.

amarkee commented 1 year ago

@chettrick Thank you for the clarification. There are so many different definitions of what constitutes free and non-free software it's good to have clear license guidelines. I will shelve this port for now and keep researching solutions.