Possible license incompatibility (Nordic and GPL)

[fgaz]

This project contains both code under GPL 3.0 and code under Nordic 5-Clause.

GPL 3.0 states:

firmware/LICENSE

Lines 210 to 212 in 10869ea

	You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to
	produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the
	terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

firmware/LICENSE

Lines 222 to 228 in 10869ea

	c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this
	License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This
	License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7
	additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts,
	regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no
	permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not
	invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

and

firmware/LICENSE

Lines 388 to 396 in 10869ea

	All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further
	restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you
	received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is
	governed by this License along with a term that is a further
	restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains
	a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this
	License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms
	of that license document, provided that the further restriction does
	not survive such relicensing or conveying.

and

firmware/LICENSE

Lines 463 to 469 in 10869ea

	You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the
	rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may
	not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of
	rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation
	(including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that
	any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for
	sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.

Nordic 5-Clause states:

firmware/src/platform/nrf52/softdevice/ble.h

Lines 21 to 25 in 10869ea

	* 4. This software, with or without modification, must only be used with a
	* Nordic Semiconductor ASA integrated circuit.
	*
	* 5. Any software provided in binary form under this license must not be reverse
	* engineered, decompiled, modified and/or disassembled.

To me these terms seem incompatible, meaning that nobody but Meshtastic LLC (the sole copyright holder due to the CLA) is allowed to legally distribute the Meshtastic firmware for nrf52 boards. Am I missing something?

[jp-bennett]

Good catch. I know at least some other projects don't consider this a problem, but we'll look into it.

[caveman99]

I talked to Thomas of Nordic Semiconductor about this and he also does not consider it a problem. These are header files we place there for CI building convenience to support different softdevices woithout needing to patch the toolchain. They're usually part of the nordic nRF5 sdk/nrfxlib which we link to anyway.