XMOS Open License or XMOS EULA

[skoe]

When I download code (e.g. SPI driver) from xmos.com, I have to agree to the "XMOS Open License". This license looks a bit like a BSD license and seems to be compatible with open source and commercial projects.

The source code itself refers to the XMOS EULA only, which is something completely different and e.g. doesn't look GPL compatible at all.

Which one is the actual license for these libraries? If it is the XMOS Open License, could you (the XMOS staff) put that one in to the source code? This would be more obvious. I'm not a lawyer and a bit confused now.

Regards,
Thomas

[Joerg]

Which one is that actual license for these libraries? If it is the XMOS Open License, could you (the XMOS staff) put that one in to the source code?

Hi Thomas,

good questions - we (as in XMOS) need to clarify this. Let me look into the situation and I'll get back to you.

Joerg

[Joerg]

Hi Thomas,

I wanted to confirm that the code is intended to be licensed under the Open XMOS license. We are going to clean up this issue and make sure the correct license is included in the code, but I wanted to provide a heads up in the meantime.

Joerg

[jonathan]

Whoever wrote the XMOS Open License quite clearly borrowed almost the entirety of the three-clause BSD license, and added what looks like legal "noise".

It would be a great idea to simply standardise on the BSD license for source code released. I believe there is no legal difference between the two licenses and the creation of a new "XMOS" license merely adds confusion to the issue of license compatibility.

Your customers would prefer a standard and standardised licensing framework for all released source code. In addition to including the correct headers on source files, could we standardise on (e.g.) the two-clause BSD?

Thanks!

[skoe]

Joerg: Thank you
jonathan: I totally agree

[Folknology]

Yup KISS BSD FTW

[dave]

The XMOS open source licence is actually based on the same licence at that used for LLVM. This makes sense as we are inevitably using this licence for our tools. Some information is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University ... ce_License

For some reason the XMOS version has diverged slightly from this licence. We are looking into this and, unless there is a very good reason not to, we plan to adopt the Illinois/NCSA licence as-is.

We have also been looking into an equivalent licence that can be applied to our hardware designs - some of these currently have copyright notices on them with no accompanying licence to make them freely usable - this was obviously not intended!

[Folknology]

If that's the case it may be beneficial for Jason to add this license to the project options

[jason]

Yup KISS BSD FTW

Totally agree with KISS. PS to which bit were your referring I should add to the project licence options?

[Folknology]

The Illinois/NCSA license as mentioned by David above