Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Mychaela Falconia]

Josh Branning <lovell.joshyyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> But if they're not willing to grant you a licence to use the code, why 
> ever would they give you more code to use?

Your view is too narrow-minded.  We stand a much greater chance of
being able to get something of value unofficially out of some specific
person at TI (either presently or formerly with them) than officially
out of TI, hence the less-official approach is the one I'm going to
pursue first.

As for licenses, your demand for GPL-compatible license terms, or more
generally for license terms which would fit the perverted definition
of free sw used by FSF etc, is not reasonable in my opinion and most
likely will NOT be received well by TI, neither by the company nor by
individual players within.  Therefore, I am not going to make such a
request with my name under it.  Instead, I would like to make a
different licensing request which would be much humbler and therefore
more likely to receive some consideration:

* I would be asking for a strictly personal, non-commercial hobbyist
  license only.  I would be perfectly OK with license terms that
  prohibit commercial use (anyone who wishes to make and sell new
  phones from surplus chips using this software would have to negotiate
  a separate commercial license with royalties) or any other use than
  strictly hobbyist/educational - my own current usage fits the latter
  category.  Obviously such a restricted license would not qualify as
  free sw in the eyes of the license-worshipping faction, but I don't
  care - I am doing this project for my own happiness and emotional
  well-being first and foremost, not to please someone else.

* I imagine that TI would not be comfortable at all with releasing the
  code under license terms that would allow someone to take it and use
  it with non-TI chips: much of the code we are making heavy use of is
  largely chipset-independent (G23M protocol stack, UI layers etc),
  but TI funded its development with the expectation that it will be
  used with chips they sold.  Therefore it would be much more
  reasonable to ask them for a license that allows personal hobbyist/
  educational use of their code *only* running on devices made with
  chips which were legitimately sold by TI.  Of course such terms
  would disqualify the license as free sw in the eyes of FSF etc, but
  the latter are just being assinine in this case, as in practical
  terms this restriction won't limit the user's freedom in any
  meaningful way: there is no practical way for a hobbyist to make any
  use of this code without running it on TI's chips.  If you are going
  to make your own chips, it'll cost you millions of dollars anyway
  for chip development and fabrication, so you should be able to
  afford to give a small chunk of that to TI for a different software
  license, and when it comes to already existing chips from vendors
  other than TI, I have no desire to undertake a port of TI's software
  to those other chips: it would be an insanely large amount of work
  for absolutely no gain.

Therefore, when the time comes to actually send a petition to someone
at TI, I would word it very differently from how Josh did it - but of
course the community as a whole will get a chance to review and
possibly edit it first - and that includes Josh and his faction.  But
first I need to find a good contact whom to send it to, and I might go
for different wording depending on who that contact is.

To Josh: I know you aren't going to like license terms that aren't
GPL-compatible and aren't free sw in FSF's definition, but if you have
a license that makes purely personal hobbyist/educational use legal,
you won't have to worry about being arrested for it, and that was/is
your primary concern, isn't it?

M~