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meshtastic / firmware

Meshtastic device firmware
https://meshtastic.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Possible license incompatibility (Nordic and GPL) #4857

Closed fgaz closed 2 days ago

fgaz commented 3 days ago

This project contains both code under GPL 3.0 and code under Nordic 5-Clause.

GPL 3.0 states:

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/10869ea10a8954d2471ae120aa0e4c76327c4fe7/LICENSE#L210-L212

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/10869ea10a8954d2471ae120aa0e4c76327c4fe7/LICENSE#L222-L228

and

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/10869ea10a8954d2471ae120aa0e4c76327c4fe7/LICENSE#L388-L396

and

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/10869ea10a8954d2471ae120aa0e4c76327c4fe7/LICENSE#L463-L469

Nordic 5-Clause states:

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/10869ea10a8954d2471ae120aa0e4c76327c4fe7/src/platform/nrf52/softdevice/ble.h#L21-L25

To me these terms seem incompatible, meaning that nobody but Meshtastic LLC (the sole copyright holder due to the CLA) is allowed to legally distribute the Meshtastic firmware for nrf52 boards. Am I missing something?

jp-bennett commented 3 days ago

Good catch. I know at least some other projects don't consider this a problem, but we'll look into it.