3 ms·

> ST's "Ultimate Liberty License" Wow. That's a shocking level of assholery. It's effectively a BSD license with an added restriction which says it can't be li

> ST's "Ultimate Liberty License" Wow. That's a shocking level of assholery. It's effectively a BSD license with an added restriction which says it can't be licensed (e.g. as part of a combined work) under any open source license. So it's an anti-open-source poison pill license under the guise of an "ultimate liberty" (??) license. It takes some insanity to freely license your software to your competitors to use in their closed-source products while explicitly adding a term to your license to prevent hobbyists from using it as open source software. > In fact, I suspect that Arduino may be in violation of both this license and the GPL by linking the ULL licensed code with GPL-licensed Arduino code. Yes, assuming that the FSF is correct that the GPL prohibits linking. IIRC GPL3 is clearer about this than GPL2. > You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program ... provided that you also meet all of these conditions ... 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. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html Edit: I removed one claim about the license being self-contradictory. On closer inspection, it is clearly not an open source license, because it requires that the software only be used "solely and exclusively on or in combination with a microcontroller or microprocessor device manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics."

kmeisthax 5y ago
Question: are judges expected to solve Russell's paradox? Because a "no open source" clause presents exactly that kind of paradox. Just try and answer me this: is the ULL an Open Source license? If the ULL is an Open Source license (perhaps because it provides all the same freedoms as one), then you can't actually use those freedoms, because of the no-open-source clause... which makes it not an Open Source license. If the ULL is NOT an Open Source license (perhaps because of the restriction against a field of endeavor), then the no-open-source clause does not trip... which means you have all the freedoms of an Open Source license. Which makes the ULL an Open Source license. No clue if you could use this argument in court to invalidate the no-open-source clause.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Ha, yes, that's what I thought initially as well. I believe the only valid possibility would be that in claiming to apply the license to the work, ST has actually failed to apply the license to the work, so all purported licenses to the work were actually invalid. Similarly if I have a license text which simply says "you may do whatever you want with the work, except that you may not receive, use, or distribute the work under the terms of this license" that's just ... a failed license. The problem is that the ULL is actually not an open source license anyway, and this became apparent when I gave it a closer reading: > The recipient will not take any action that jeopardizes STMicroelectronics and its licensors' proprietary rights This appears to make political lobbying to abolish intellectual property a violation of the terms of the license, putting it in probable violation of the OSI Definition item 5: "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" > This software or any part thereof, including modifications and/or derivative works of this software, must be used and execute solely and exclusively on or in combination with a microcontroller or microprocessor device manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics. This is a clear violation of the OSI Definition item 10: "License Must Be Technology-Neutral" and item 6: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". So unfortunately you don't get the fun paradox like I initially thought, because the license is clearly not an open source license even without the "no open source" clause.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    Alright. I thought this was some weird/clever way to try and keep their software from being merged with other projects without introducing a new copyleft ala Sun/CDDL
RF_Savage 5y ago
Hah. That last part explains it all. Stuff like ST's official docs, IDE's and many libraries ware previously released under more permissive licenses. And then clones happened. For example GigaDevice ships the old ST IDE for their GD32 series of binary and peripheral compatible micros with essentially just ST's logos replaced by theirs. Licenses like ULL make it harder for players like GigaDevice to make software compatible clones not violate licenses if used with ST libs.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Question: are judges expected to solve Russell's paradox? Because a "no open source" clause presents exactly that kind of paradox. Just try and answer me this: is the ULL an Open Source license? If the ULL is an Open Source license (perhaps because it provides all the same freedoms as one), then you can't actually use those freedoms, because of the no-open-source clause... which makes it not an Open Source license. If the ULL is NOT an Open Source license (perhaps because of the restriction against a field of endeavor), then the no-open-source clause does not trip... which means you have all the freedoms of an Open Source license. Which makes the ULL an Open Source license. No clue if you could use this argument in court to invalidate the no-open-source clause.

bscphil 5y ago
Ha, yes, that's what I thought initially as well. I believe the only valid possibility would be that in claiming to apply the license to the work, ST has actually failed to apply the license to the work, so all purported licenses to the work were actually invalid. Similarly if I have a license text which simply says "you may do whatever you want with the work, except that you may not receive, use, or distribute the work under the terms of this license" that's just ... a failed license. The problem is that the ULL is actually not an open source license anyway, and this became apparent when I gave it a closer reading: > The recipient will not take any action that jeopardizes STMicroelectronics and its licensors' proprietary rights This appears to make political lobbying to abolish intellectual property a violation of the terms of the license, putting it in probable violation of the OSI Definition item 5: "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" > This software or any part thereof, including modifications and/or derivative works of this software, must be used and execute solely and exclusively on or in combination with a microcontroller or microprocessor device manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics. This is a clear violation of the OSI Definition item 10: "License Must Be Technology-Neutral" and item 6: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". So unfortunately you don't get the fun paradox like I initially thought, because the license is clearly not an open source license even without the "no open source" clause.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Alright. I thought this was some weird/clever way to try and keep their software from being merged with other projects without introducing a new copyleft ala Sun/CDDL

RF_Savage 5y ago

Hah. That last part explains it all. Stuff like ST's official docs, IDE's and many libraries ware previously released under more permissive licenses. And then clones happened. For example GigaDevice ships the old ST IDE for their GD32 series of binary and peripheral compatible micros with essentially just ST's logos replaced by theirs. Licenses like ULL make it harder for players like GigaDevice to make software compatible clones not violate licenses if used with ST libs.