Will using APM 32 MCUs produced and sold by GEELY company instead of STM32 cause any license violation? The code I compiled for ST works in APM32.

[ACALI.1]

Will using APM 32 MCUs produced and sold by GEELY company instead of STM32 cause any license violation?

[Peter BENSCH]

Welcome, @ACALI.1​, to the community!

None of the clones were licensed by STMicroelectronics to any other manufacturer. It does not matter that the software on these clones may work in the same way. Yes, in this respect you are violating the licence conditions that are mentioned for the Firmware libraries in their Software Package License Agreement SLA0048 (the following is an excerpt):

2. Redistributions in binary form, except as embedded into microcontroller or microprocessor device manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics or a software update for such device, must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

[...]

4. This software package or any part thereof, including modifications and/or derivative works of this software package, must be used and execute solely and exclusively on or in combination with a microcontroller or a microprocessor devices manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics.

By the way, it is also mean and disrespectful of the manufacturer's work to use their freely provided software to use it on cheap clones.

Regards

/Peter

[Tesla DeLorean]

You might also want to check that GEELY has paid all patent pool and IP licencing appropriately, and that your products don't violate other IP holders rights.

[Piranha]

To read the licence text, one has to learn the spelling. Geely is a car maker.

[Piranha]

Ironically, except for SBSFU and probably few other packages, ST's own attitude to thw quality of ST's firmware code for STM32 microcontrollers is on the same level of disrespect against customers, who are supposed to use it.

[Peter BENSCH]

@Piranha​ Free software and firmware is disrespectful to customers?

Isn't that a tiny bit harsh?

You are very welcome to contribute with improvements to the firmware via the Github repository.

Regards

/Peter

[Piranha]

Marketing something as a "production-ready, highly portable, consistent, complete and high quality", but then shipping an amateurish, broken, bloated and practically unusable junk by a team, who is often incapable of understanding the complaints and bug reports, and is even less capable of fixing the issues, indeed is disrespectful. Something being free cannot be an excuse of it being a junk. And there are many good examples of free decent software: FreeRTOS, lwIP, TinyUSB, FatFS, mbed TLS, BearSSL and many other. Unfortunately most of the STM32 firmware code is so bad, that it cannot even be compared to those. It's like this:

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5744dd6686db43a53993fb09/1609532233705-ACWWTQCPFJ0RG0F0F33I/homemade+kit+car+street+legal.JPG

Is it a car? Yes, kind of. Is it a decent, reliable, production ready car? Absolutely no. Can it be fixed by replacing the seats and wood panels? No.

I am contributing at least by reporting bugs, issues and some suggestions. The Cube/HAL team knows that topic very well... What have they done during 3 years of it's existence? A little bit more than nothing! It took them 2 years to rewrite the completely dysfunctional Ethernet driver for H7 - that's beyond ridiculous. And, while the new driver is an improvement for H7, the porting to F4 was again done by someone completely incompetent and, of course, turned out to be a complete disaster.

By the way, recently another ST employee approached me with a private message and asked for some hints/overview about this whole STM32 firmware code quality issue, which I did. Should I forward that overview to you also? Or maybe add you to that discussion?

[cutterhead]

think that employee at st need to realised that seggers partner with amp , so it doesnt look like a violation and seems like geehy payed their full diligence

https://www.segger.com/news/segger-and-geehy-partner-to-fully-support-the-apm32-series-mcu/

[Peter BENSCH]

@cutterhead Please read the text on the website again - it only states that Segger also supports those MCUs with its J-LINK. This has NOTHING to do with an agreement between that manufacturer and STMicroelectronics regarding the MCUs.

The use of software and/or libraries from STMicroelectronics without such an agreement - which, by the way, can only be made with STMicroelectronics - is clearly a violation of the above-mentioned licence conditions.