Licensing Concerns

Tip / Sign in to post questions, reply, level up, and achieve exciting badges. Know more

cross mob
Anonymous
Not applicable

I'm looking into the WICED WiFi platform for a product I'm looking to develop, but I have some pretty severe concerns about the licensing of the SDK v3.1.1.

It looks to me that the intention is that the actual libraries that are for use in application code should be licensed under a BSD license per the LICENSE.txt file. However, this is never explicitly stated anywhere that I can find, just a vague statement that says "Code/libraries that may be compiled and linked with the target application [...] This code is provided under license terms similar to FreeBSD" which seems legally useless. Furthermore all the files that would be needed to be part of my application have a rather scary copyright statement that seems to imply that this code isn't supposed to even be published:

/*
* Copyright 2014, Broadcom Corporation

* All Rights Reserved.

*

* This is UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE of Broadcom Corporation;

* the contents of this file may not be disclosed to third parties, copied

* or duplicated in any form, in whole or in part, without the prior

* written permission of Broadcom Corporation.

*/

Can I get some clarification on the license terms of these files. If they are intended to be released under a BSD license when can I expect a SDK release that properly declares the license term statements?

Thanks

4 Replies
Anonymous
Not applicable

Any chance I can get a comment on this? Even if it's a "No, go away!" I'd like to know for sure one way or the other.

0 Likes

Would some of this be covered in the Broadcom Community License Agreement (Updated 7-21-14) ?

0 Likes
Anonymous
Not applicable

I sure hope not. That is a very restrictive license. I hope that Broadcom will reconsider and distribute at least the basic interface driver libraries under a more permissive license.

0 Likes
Anonymous
Not applicable

Seconded.

The example code all bears the restrictive license shown above; this means that I can't share anything I make based on the example code with any other potential developers. Worse, since the example code is basically all the documentation there is, this means that I basically can't share anything I make at all with other potential developers; every developer has to start from the beginning, digging through these forums and asking the same questions over and over again.

This restrictive license severely limits my ability to help developers I'd like to recommend the BCM2073x to. This is probably the biggest obstacle to the growth of a developer community on this platform.