> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only.
Under what legal theory?
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The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.
As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand parts.
… which would kill your business, unless you are able to source an alternative part. So not entirely harmless.
One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only for some kinds of use.
(and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)
Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all...
However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.
They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute their SDK in your firmware without their permission.