28-03-2012, 05:05 PM
In general MISRA welcomes tool support for its rule sets, whether these are released under commercial terms or an "open source" arrangement. In either case the tool developer is required to enter into a license agreement to permit the use of the MISRA name (which is a registered trademark) and where appropriate the rule texts (which are copyrighted).
Also it is MISRA's policy not to endorse any particular tool.
MISRA's license policies exist primarily to preserve the integrity of the rule texts which are the result of many person-years of effort by a number of very dedicated volunteers and we want to discourage variations that could cause confusion. This is the main motivation behind our licensing policies, so that end-users have a clear baseline to work with.
In this respect attempts to avoid licensing the rules through creating a paraphrase of the texts are also discouraged since much effort has been expended by members of the MISRA activities in creating clear and unambiguous statements of the rules.
In the case of an open-source tool, therefore, we would not permit the rule texts to be included if the entire tool were released under the GPL or similar arrangement. It would be acceptable for an open-source tool to include the rule texts if the MISRA checker part of the tool were released as an additional module under a commercial license agreement that contained the expected restrictions on reverse engineering or extracting of information from the software.
For a tool which is released on an entirely open-source basis, the practical solution is that diagnostic messages from the tool can only cite the MISRA rule number and not the rule text.
Also it is MISRA's policy not to endorse any particular tool.
MISRA's license policies exist primarily to preserve the integrity of the rule texts which are the result of many person-years of effort by a number of very dedicated volunteers and we want to discourage variations that could cause confusion. This is the main motivation behind our licensing policies, so that end-users have a clear baseline to work with.
In this respect attempts to avoid licensing the rules through creating a paraphrase of the texts are also discouraged since much effort has been expended by members of the MISRA activities in creating clear and unambiguous statements of the rules.
In the case of an open-source tool, therefore, we would not permit the rule texts to be included if the entire tool were released under the GPL or similar arrangement. It would be acceptable for an open-source tool to include the rule texts if the MISRA checker part of the tool were released as an additional module under a commercial license agreement that contained the expected restrictions on reverse engineering or extracting of information from the software.
For a tool which is released on an entirely open-source basis, the practical solution is that diagnostic messages from the tool can only cite the MISRA rule number and not the rule text.
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