I'm probably not the first person to mention this, Alan... but... If you made changes to the source of any Gnu Public Licence-licensed (GPL) binaries from the original authors, and recompiled new binaries, you're required to make those changes available under the terms of the GPL. (Making them available doesn't mean you have to put them on the web, the full terms are in the GPL itself.)
Hopefully you've carefully reviewed the source licenses of any code modified to produce new binaries (if any of the binaries were modified) on the system, and are either planning up-front to release all of those changes, or have written permission from all authors and copyright holders (sometimes very hard to determine if multiple people have contributed to something before it made its way to you). Having been involved in reviewing this requirement with IRLP and Dave Cameron many years ago, he avoided the problem by only modifying one binary that he didn't write himself. That binary was released to the Public Domain and wasn't under the GPL, and everything else on the system was written from scratch... so no problems for his system. Drivers for the kernel are also sometimes a different story -- they might be dual-licensed under the GPL and the LGPL, which changes the rules somewhat (but not much), and many tools on so-called "Linux" systems are actually licensed under the BSD (Berkeley Systems Division) licenses which allow much more room to make commercial products without releasing source code. Just mentioning it because a lot of very big companies (Linksys, Microchip, others) have fallen into the Linux licensing trap and were forced by the Free Software Foundation to release their modifications to the original GPL-licensed source code. You probably knew all of the above, already... but just mentioning it... Embedded Linux can be a pain in this regard, which is what drove Linksys to move to VxWorks for their small routers. By that time, people had figured out how Linksys hardware worked via reverse- engineering and some really neat modifications had started to come out. Enough that when the community demanded Linksys keep the old hardware available, they did... under a new model name ending in an "L", for "Linux". In the end, it didn't hurt them. They still got my $50 or whatever for this WRT54GS in the basement, but it's certainly no longer running their code! It does a hell of a lot more (but it's also too complex for Joe- sixpack to configure!) than Linksys ever intended, now that it has DD- WRT installed on the flash. Not that I use most of its new capabilities created by the Linux community -- I never thought I'd see a Linksys router capable of mounting a Windows fileshare via Samba as local "disk" space, but it'll do it. It is nice to be able to ssh to it, though, and get a BusyBox command prompt and fiddle with its guts. Nate WY0X On May 16, 2007, at 8:40 AM, Allan Overcast wrote: > We are discussing the possibility, on a per-person licence basis. > But that is only in the discussion stages currently. Depending on > interest, will help us make that decision. > > Allan Overcast KF7FW > Link Communications, Inc. > www.link-comm.com > > Preston Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The 404 appears to have just about everything one > could want in a controller and much more. I noticed > it's running Linux. Does this mean the source code > will be available? > > Preston Moore > > >Here is the link to the new Digital Controllers > >product brief. > > > > > http://www.link-comm.com//ftp/rlc-dsp404/handouts/>RLC-DSP404.pdf > > > > Allan Overcast KF7FW > > Link Communications, Inc. > > www.link-comm.com > > __________________________________________________________Got a > little couch potato? > Check out fun summer activities for kids. > http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities > +for+kids&cs=bz > > > Get the Yahoo! toolbar and be alerted to new email wherever you're > surfing. -- Nate Duehr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
