search

EspoTek / Labrador

EspoTek Labrador is a USB device that transforms your PC or smartphone into a fully-featured electronics lab. This repo holds all of the source code!
http://espotek.com
1.1k stars 117 forks source link

Licensing issues #175

Closed mikhirev closed 3 years ago

mikhirev commented 3 years ago

Hi!

Your project does not contain copyright information and license text. README.md states that all software files are licensed under GNU GPL v3, but this is wrong at least for firmware that contains source code copyrighted by Atmel and licensed under the terms of non-free license.

Please provide more detailed and correct copyright/licensing information.

EspoTek commented 3 years ago

I am not a lawyer and have no idea how to resolve this. If you would like to submit a PR rectifying this, go ahead and do so.

mikhirev commented 3 years ago

Well, I can add the GPLv3 text and copyright notices (are you the only copyright holder?) to all source files as recommended in the GPL itself. But I cannot choose a proper license for firmware, only give some suggestions.

As I see, the Atmel license is based on the 3-clause BSD license but contains an additional restrictive clause, making it non-free and incompatible with GPL. It means that you are not permitted to distribute the compiled and linked firmware under the terms of GPL. If you distribute only the source code, licensees could compile and use it, but also couldn't redistribute .hex files.

You may choose for your code the unmodified 3-clause BSD license or the 2-clause BSD license if you don't care about using your name in promotions. Then you and every licensee will be able to (re)distribute .hex files under the terms of Atmel license because it is more restrictive.

You may also apply the Atmel license to your code, but I don't see any point in doing so. You may choose another permissive license for your code, but if you do, you will need a lawyer to conceive resulting terms of .hex files distribution.

mikhirev commented 3 years ago

If you want to distribute your code under GPLv3, it is also possible if you add a license exception as described here.

EspoTek commented 3 years ago

OK, thanks for the explanation. I've updated the readme to state that the Microcontroller side of the software is licenced under the 3 clause BSD license.