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I think they've added a fair bit of stuff to it, and are unwilling to release their source, because they don't actually ship the modified GCC, they can not release their changes.

IIRC, most of the stuff they've added are surrounding libraries and such.

It's basically a canonical example of why the Affero GPL exists.

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The big benefit of using mbed is there really nice API which abstracts the hardware. The code for the API is Apache, and available on github[1].

Furthermore, you don't even need to use their online IDE to do anything. The online IDE has an option to export your project such that it can be built with arm-none-abi-gcc and make[2], or you can use their mbed-cli tool, which is a python based command line tool, and is also on github[3].

The mbed guys have way embraced open source and working with existing tools, and I wished the community would embrace them more, since I think their API's beat the snot out of Arduino.

[1]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os [2]: https://developer.mbed.org/handbook/Exporting-to-offline-too... [3]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-cli

Huh, I guess that's changed. I remember looking at mbed at one point, and at that time it had no offline option (which basically made it a non-option for me).

I'll have to re-evaluate it the next time I need a little mcu board!

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