Hello, note that I'm not a lawyer. I can only provide my personal opinion regarding that topic. Depending of the legal system of your country a lawyer might has a different point of view. I'm also only a small part of the project and can't speak for all persons involved.
As far as I understand your situation you basically forked RTEMS. The fork would consist of "rtems src" and "rtems src2". These parts would be covered by the RTEMS license. So if you provide a binary to someone, you would have to make the "rtems src" and "rtems src2" available to this person too if they ask. But your application is still a separate part and would be covered by the linking exception. That means: you can keep it private. Please note that there is an ongoing effort to change the RTEMS license to a BSD style license. A lot of sources are already BSD licensed. You can see that if you have a look at the file headers. As another note: RTEMS is always open to patches. So you might want to think about polishing the "rtems src2" parts a bit and sending them to the mailing list for integration into the official sources. Best regards Christian On 18/07/2020 11:45, small...@aliyun.com wrote: > Hi, > There is a project using rtems as a real time os in an arm cortex R5 > bsp. Primary RTEMS License says > that RTEMS is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under > terms of the > GPL. > As a special exception, including RTEMS header files in a file, instantiating > RTEMS generics or templates, or linking other files with RTEMS objects to > produce an executable application, does not by itself cause the resulting > executable application to be covered by the GPL. > I draw a picture to describe this special exception: > There are "rtems src", "rtems header" and our "application". The "rtems > src" will be compiled to a lib called "rtems lib". If our "application" > includes "rtems header" and linkes with "rtems lib", then our > "application" does not follow GPL. > > OK, here is my question: we modify some code in "rtems src" and build it > to "rtems lib2". If our "application" includes "rtems header" and > linkes with "rtems lib2", whether or not our "application" should follow > GPL? > (of course, rtems src2 should follow GPL) > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > small...@aliyun.com > > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list > devel@rtems.org > http://lists.rtems.org/mailman/listinfo/devel > _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@rtems.org http://lists.rtems.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
