That was my point. I can buy some of these chips in qty 1 on digikey, but without any documentation for the host interface I can't use them. And I don't want to sign an NDA for an open-source project.
-
Most OSS licenses aren't really opensource by that strict definition. People use code generators, companies obscure registers, comments not meant for public consumption get redacted. It's a worthy ideal but not always feasible in practice. Which is why so many OSS licenses exist.
This is literally the definition by the people who came up with the term "open source" in early 1998 because they felt that "free software" was ill defined (different people had different opinions on what it means).This particular bit has nothing to do with the license. Idk what's so hard to understand here.. You can release whatever you want under any license you want. Just don't call it open source if the thing you release isn't the actual source code, even if released under OSI license.