On: ESP8266 as Open Source Hardware

[hackshack]

Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have been validated by your target audience.

[gspr → hackshack]

I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d...

The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them.

Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.

[an_d_rew → gspr]

Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To...

Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE...

They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation.

They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips.

If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!

[gspr → an_d_rew]

Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look!

Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?

[an_d_rew → gspr]

No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.