SDK and SoftDevice licenses

[Max]

Hello,

Since this seems to be a very hard topic to find info about (its very contradictory and confuse) I'd like to ask a Nordic employee directly.

I'm planning to build a product that will use the NRF51822 MCU.

I'd like to use it's BLE functionalities.

My question is, from what I've gathered around reading, I can't share headers/source code that uses SDK stuff.

Is there any problem with selling the chip, as part of the product, already flashed with a softdevice + application ?

The code itself would not be shared in anyway (we plan to keep it closed source).

Would there be any limitations?

[haakonsh]

Hey Max,

You can ship your product with the SoftDevice and application.

Our SDKs used to have a "sub-optimal" licence agreement which actually prevented any customer from using any part of our SDK in their products. We have never pursued any legal action based on this SDK license because that would chase away all our customers. We have updated our license agreement to include 3-, 4- and 5-clause agreements for various examples that uses closed source libraries. The licenses states that you are only allowed to used our SD + SDK in a Nordic product, and that you are not allowed to modify or re-engineer closed sourced libraries and the SoftDevices.

The other guys who have answered are also correct :)

[Max]

Yeah, The plan is to use it on a nrf51822 so it is for sure a Nordic product!

So, just to clarify and sumarize, there is no problem on using the SDK examples as a base, code over it to add functionality/performance, and then ship my product with a SoftDevice + that application flashed onto it, correct?

[haakonsh]

Yes, you are correct.