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guysoft / CustomPiOS

A Raspberry Pi and other ARM devices distribution builder
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Clarification of License Terms wrt. Artifacts and Custom Distributions #145

Closed memchk closed 3 years ago

memchk commented 3 years ago

For reference, I am considering producing a small-scale commercial product using the Raspberry Pi, using this system to build the images.

  1. The CustomPIOS code itself is obviously under the GPLv3 terms as anyone would expect.

  2. For my specific distribution modules / tree, is the intent for the GPL to be copyleft here? I.E if I make a "memchkOS" distro using the CustomPIOS framework would you that tree to be distributed with the GPL or compatible license?

  3. As above, what is the license status of the built image, including any proprietary software like custom software, data, etc. that may be included?

I guess this question comes down to if licensing terms like the GCC are expected where the compiler itself is under GPL and your code along with the produced artifacts are unencumbered, or if the intent is to be completely copyleft? I wanted to make sure I was following your intentions before committing to using this toolkit.

guysoft commented 3 years ago
  1. Yes its is :)
  2. the modules in your distro and your distro code is yours to license. You can supply the CustomPiOS code with it but it has to be under GPLv3.
  3. The license of the built image depends on what you are shipping in the image. Same as if you would have opened the image, edited it manually, and closed it up.

Its indeed similar to GCC, though note that many images have lots of requirements that might not be relevant to CustomPiOS.

If you have any more questions, or there is something in the current license that is limiting you please feel free to share.

memchk commented 3 years ago

I think that clarifies it for me, I will close the issue now. Thanks for making CustomPIOS, it has turned out to be extremely useful in my prototyping!