The GPL doesn't say you can't charge money for things. Do they provide patches for their changes to the source?
- you can charge money for things
- anything that's not built with the "official compiler" is not "supported"
They used ARM chips, so not even anything strange...
The real issue would come if they did not provide the source code for the gcc build they sell you, though.
Related, compiler bugs aren’t uncommon in the arm-none-eabi family. Especially the cortex m0 seems to have a few that recur every few years.
This is critical if you want any support from the vendor.
If you come to them with a bug in their hardware but you’re not using their toolchain and BSP, it’s the end of the road. You have to recreate a minimal reproduction of the bug in their ecosystem before they’ll look at it.
When you’re working at company scale, paying $1000 for a compiler is a trivial expense.
From my perspective, it's much better to reproduce a bug with a 20-line C or assembler file that compiles with upstream gcc, completely ruling all of their custom stuff out as the root cause.
Just tell me what the silicon does when I poke this register and I'll work around it.
Mhm. I'd say, you're forced to reproduce it on their toolchain and BSP, which may or may not be the end of the road depending on how complex the problem and your use case are.
(I am aware that there's a certain kind of mindset that likes to lean on support from vendors to do basically anything, and I think if you're in a position where you actually get good support, that might work, but in most of the instances where I've seen such a mentality it tends to produce expensive results that still don't actually work, and sometimes even when AFAICT the vendor's pretty switched on, they just don't actually have all the context)