LEGO NTX Firmware Source Code Released

Posted 27 Dec 2006 at 22:34 UTC by steve

You may recall our report back in May of 2006 on LEGO's claim that they would Open Source the LEGO NTX firmware. Six months later, after several delays, it appears this may have happened. They chose not to use an approved Free Software license, instead, adding to the problem of license proliferation by writing their own. There's no word on whether LEGO has submitted the license to either the Open Source Initiative or the Free Software Foundation for approval. A quick read of the license (IANAL) suggests that it isn't GPL compatible but should qualify under the more lax standards of Open Source. Until the Open Source Initiative officially approves the LEGO license, we can't really call it Open Source but the source has been released and can be downloaded now. Worst case, this should help the developers and maintainers of free alternatives to the LEGO firmware like BrickOS. The source includes all the files needed for the ATMEL 8-bit AVR and ATMEL ARM7 microcontrollers.