Comment by phoehne

Comment by phoehne 7 days ago

11 replies

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You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. It wouldn't effect tinkering at home or use in a classroom, but would mean you couldn't buy a stack of Nanos, flash them, and plug them into your project, if it is for a commercial purpose.

josephcsible 7 days ago

> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only.

Under what legal theory?

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  • geerlingguy 7 days ago

    The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.

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  • stephen_g 7 days ago

    As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand parts.

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    • Jolter 7 days ago

      … which would kill your business, unless you are able to source an alternative part. So not entirely harmless.

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  • q3k 7 days ago

    One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only for some kinds of use.

    (and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)

    Reply View 1 reply
    • limagnolia 7 days ago

      Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all...

      However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.

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  • e44858 7 days ago

    They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute their SDK in your firmware without their permission.

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ndiddy 7 days ago

> You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue.

Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.

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  • phoehne 7 days ago

    That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway.

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    • ndiddy 7 days ago

      From that support article:

      > Last but not least, you need to comply with article 4.d of the LGPL license which has specific and very technical requirements. Complying with such requirements, which derive from the LGPL being used in the Arduino core, is usually a matter of providing end users with some documentation and binary files.

      Article 4d of the LGPL requires library users to either:

      > 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.

      > 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.

      Because the Arduino code is statically linked to your application to create the firmware binary, you're required to use option 0 (distribute your application's object files so it can be relinked with the Arduino library).

      > And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway

      That's definitely true! That's why I said I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.

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