Needs a licence

[Pharap]

This library doesn't appear to contain a licence so it's not clear how it's allowed to be used.

Is it copyrighted?
Is it in the public domain?

Without a licence the default assumption must be that nobody has permission to use it.

[per1234]

It's certainly not much code but I'm no lawyer and I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to respecting people's intellectual property.

The readme says the library was copied from here:
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/AvailableMemory

The Arduino Playground page says it was copied from:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=27536.msg204024#msg204024

The Arduino Forum thread says it was copied from:
https://forum.pololu.com/t/826

The Pololu Forum thread indicates paul was the original author. On the Pololu website I found paul has a GitHub account: @pdg137 so perhaps they'll comment here.

maniacbug doesn't seem to be active anymore but anyone can edit the Arduino Playground to add license documentation. The code on the Playground has since been modified by Matthew Murdoch (mmurdoch) to walk the free list so we might need to ask them as well.

[pdg137]

It's sad that we live in a world where you have to seek permission to use a couple of lines of code that I posted on a forum 10 years ago. But anyway, as I mentioned later in that thread, we included that code with the Pololu AVR Library, which was originally released with a Creative Commons License and is now under a more appropriate MIT License. (We'll probably remove the CC License comment from that file in a future release.) So, if you aren't comfortable considering this fair use, feel free to use it according to one of those licenses.

[per1234]

Thanks for the response and your contribution to the Arduino community pdg137! I've found your code to be very useful and I'm sure many others have as well.

I hadn't seen that mention of it being added to the Pololu AVR Library. I apologize for bothering you. I've seen a couple instances in the past where people assuming fairly trivial publicly published code to be freely given ended up causing a lot of drama and lost community resources so I decided it's better to ask permission than forgiveness even if perhaps a court would determine that permission is not required.

I have submitted a PR adding the MIT license to this repository: #6
If there's anything not to your liking about that just let me know and I'll update the PR.

[per1234]

@mmurdoch I see you added the walking the free list code to the version of the MemoryFree library which is on the Arduino Playground:
http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/AvailableMemory

The author of the original code, pdg137, has stated that it may be licensed under either Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 or MIT licenses. I'd like to add the MIT license to the code on the Arduino Playground as well as the copy of that library which is hosted on Github:
https://github.com/McNeight/MemoryFree
Are you OK with your work on that library being licensed under the MIT license?

[landret]

@mmurdoch did you accept your work on this library being licensed under MIT license?

[mmurdoch]

I don’t recall, but I’m happy to do so 😊 Thanks, Matthew

…

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