Claire Xen  🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🧙🏻‍♀️ BLM  🏴 🚩

It's not clear that signing the NDA and utilizing the chip in a real design would prevent you from producing open source software which utilizes the chip in your design. You just have to ensure every bit of what you code is strictly necessary to the design and don't explain.

Yes, but being under NDA would force you to not comment register writes, etc and generally produce poorly maintainable code. Unless you had a "secret" version of the code and then deleted the comments for the public copy.

If you have a "secret" version and only publish something with the comments removed then you are in violation of clause 2 of the open source definition, i.e. it is not open source anymore.

Interesting perspective. Are missing comments considered missing code in the spirit of "fully" open source? I wonder what @MicrochipTech has to say, given this conversation mentions their ECC608 crypto chip.

For example: clearly naming a register but simply not commenting what bit patterns are being stuffed or why... Is an open source violation? It's not obfuscated. It is the original, full source.

What? No! Please just *read* the text I quoted. If you have two versions of the code, one that you edit, and one that's generated from the first, then releasing just this generated code, not the one you'd edit, is not releasing the "source code" wrt OSD.

Yes, I did read it. Source code with or without comments should compile exactly the same. So you are saying that comments are source code? My only point is that it is an interesting question.