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Comment by rpcope1 | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to know why you would choose this over something like the Contiki uIP or lwIP that everything seems to use.

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Not sure if they do for _this_ package, but the Wolf* people's model is usually selling certification packages so you can put their things in stuff that need certifications and you offload liability. You also get people that wrote it and that you can pay for support. I kind of like them, had a short project where I had to call on them for getting their WolfSSL to work with a ATECC508 device and it was pretty good support from them.

As the project is GPL’ed I guess they sell a commercial version. GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software. But it can be good marketing to sell the commercial version.

Edit: I meant commercial license

You don't need a commercial version, many projects get away with selling just a commercial license to the same version. As long as they have the rights to relicense this works fine.

I think they might sell a commercial version as well. It makes sense with the GPL. But I can't really recall that well.

In my company we used their stuff often. They have an optional commercial license for basically all their products. The price was very reasonable as well.

“GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software”

Why is that?

He probably meant viral or tried to make a deadly twist on virality

Many bare metal or RTOS systems consist of a handful of statically linked programs (one or two bootloaders and the main application), many companies would rather find a non-GPL library rather than open up the rest of the system's code. Sometimes a system contains proprietary code that may not be open sourced as well.

In the embedded world you don't really sell software you sell devices with firmware. Unless the library OS is AGPL, it doesn't matter too much.

Yes it matters a lot?

It matters because:

1) you may not have the right to open the rest of the code on the system 2) although you make money when you sell devices, it also makes cloning trivial

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