Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Josh Branning]

On 15/12/15 15:44, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
> 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~
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I am very disappointed at this decision. I would really like to see this 
project become free software.