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.

Not commenting = not a problem with OSD. Removing a comment for the "release version" of the code = a problem with OSD. With comments removed is obviously not the "original, full source". The assertion that comments aren't part of the source is ridiculous on so many levels.

If one needed a pedantic workaround for this, you could merely have comments like "NDA Derived Details: See Private Doc X page/section Y" as the real comment in the real source code tree.