Is the TI License free?
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Hi everyone. Since I don't have much knowledge about licenses I wanted to ask for help in identifying if a TI-licensed software is considered to be free software.
The software I'm using is -> https://git.ti.com/processor-firmware/ti-amx3-cm3-pm-firmware/trees/ti-v4.1.y (see the License.txt file, that's the Texas Instruments Software License Agreement)
Note that from the files under bin/ folder, only am335x-pm-firmware.bin and am335x-pm-firmware.elf can be built from source, the rest of the files have no source code (which makes them non-free).
Regarding the am335x-pm-firmware.* files, are they free software? if not, which of the four freedoms of free software it's not respecting? and why?
Thanks for helping.
"The Licensed Materials being provided to you hereunder are being made
publicly available by TI, even though they contain copyrighted material of TI
and its licensors, if applicable. In no event may you alter, remove or
destroy any copyright notice included in the Licensed Materials. To the extent
that any of the Licensed Materials are provided in binary or object code only,
you may not unlock, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise
translate such binary or object code to human-perceivable form. The source code
of such reverse engineered code may contain TI trade secret and other
proprietary information. TI reserves all rights not specifically granted under
this Agreement."
so any blobs are not explicitly non-free. Of course, blobs are non-free anyway because they do not respect freedoms 1 and 3. As for the rest,
"For the Licensed Materials provided in source
code format, TI hereby grants to you a limited, non-exclusive license to
reproduce, use, and create modified or derivative works of the Licensed
Materials provided to you in source code format and to distribute an unlimited
number of copies of such source code Licensed Materials, or any derivatives
thereof, in any format."
so it sounds like anything provided in source code form respects all four freedoms *legally* and might be free software. However, if it depends on the blobs to build or run then it is non-free *in practice*. So I guess the question is whether you can omit the blobs and still build and use the software, which I doubt. I'm not a lawyer and don't know much about licenses, but I don't think that this is free software.
You probably want to work with the FSF on this. It's already in their queue.
The preliminary conclusion was that it is at the very least GPL-incompatible (choice of law clause in section 6), possibly non-free because of the PRC provisions of section 7 (Because "you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way" from the Free Software Definition) and that any object code is most certainly proprietary because of 3(a). There may be other issues.
Anyway, you probably want to work with the FSF on this instead of the Trisquel forums.
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