Anne van Rossum

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9 years, 5 months ago.

Do you follow Nordic copyright statement?

I was directed to someone to start using mbed for our commercial products, but I've some questions about copyrights.

The files in the app_common directory:

http://developer.mbed.org/users/mbed_official/code/mbed/file/031413cf7a89/TARGET_NRF51_DONGLE/TARGET_NORDIC/TARGET_MCU_NRF51822/Lib/nrf-sdk/app_common/app_button.h

have a copyright statement from Nordic:

/* Copyright (c) 2012 Nordic Semiconductor. All Rights Reserved.
 *
 * The information contained herein is property of Nordic Semiconductor ASA.
 * Terms and conditions of usage are described in detail in NORDIC
 * SEMICONDUCTOR STANDARD SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT.
 *
 * Licensees are granted free, non-transferable use of the information. NO
 * WARRANTY of ANY KIND is provided. This heading must NOT be removed from
 * the file.
 *
 */

It states non-transferable use of this information. Do you have a special agreement with Nordic to publish their code?

Question relating to:

Last updated: 20 Feb 2019
The official Mbed 2 C/C++ SDK provides the software platform and libraries to build your applications.

1 Answer

Eirik Midttun
9 years, 5 months ago.

As long as you leave the copyright header you can do pretty much as you want. The files are from the Nordic SDK, so the copyright notice came with it. The full terms and conditions are now in the SDK; see licence.txt under Documentation.

But the license states, I quote:

"4. Distribution Restrictions Except as set forward in Section 1 above, the Licensee may not disclose or distribute any or all parts of the SDK to any third party. Licensee agrees to provide reasonable security precautions to prevent unauthorized access to or use of the SDK as proscribed herein. Licensee also agrees that use of and access to the SDK will be strictly limited to the employees and subcontractors of the Licensee necessary for the performance of development, verification and production tasks under this Agreement. The Licensee is responsible for making such employees and subcontractors agree on complying with the obligations concerning use and non-disclosure of the SDK."

So, it doesn't seem to be okay to publish files online!?

Look, I understand if Nordic says that "non-transferable" means here that their software shouldn't used with other hardware! Which I would totally understand. But it should be clear to developers what non-transferable means here... If it is okay to copy files with this header file intact the license as in https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/documentation/nrf51/6.1.0/license.txt should be rewritten. :-)

posted by Anne van Rossum 12 Nov 2014