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SlashDevin / NeoGPS

NMEA and ublox GPS parser for Arduino, configurable to use as few as 10 bytes of RAM
GNU General Public License v3.0
702 stars 194 forks source link

Question on GPL3 Licence scope #127

Open qcabrol opened 5 years ago

qcabrol commented 5 years ago

Hi,

I see that your work is licenced under GPL3. Though we would be interested to use it in a work including proprietary licenced elements as well. Question is the scope of the licence: do we have the obligation to release all of our device firmware (strong copyleft - affecting the proprietary licenced parts of the project) or is it acceptable to release only the changes and improvements/extensions affecting the NeoGPS library?

Thanks in advance Best

bamapookie commented 5 years ago

I'm not an expert or a lawyer, but as I read the license, any modifications you make to the GPS software itself must also be released under the GPLv3. ~If you use it inside of a larger product, that code doesn't need to be GPLv3.~

Edit: No, you would need to release your source as well. See here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47032/can-i-use-gpl-software-in-a-commercial-application

I don't know if this includes your propriatary firmware, but if that isn't your code, it would probably not be included.

qcabrol commented 5 years ago

Ok, that was my concern. Would be nice to have this library under a more flexible Clear BSD, Apache2, MIT or even L-GPLv3 licensing. I guess I will rewrite my own as I need to support more of the UBX functions anyway.

bamapookie commented 5 years ago

I doubt you are likely to get a license change. @SlashDevin has not been active on GitHub (much less, this repo) for over a year.