Despite the popularity of these repositories holding firmware code I can see none of them have a proper open source license.
The implications of not using a license are explained here. Basically it means that all contributors have exclusive right on the code they created and any of them could claim exclusive usage on their part of the code, thus making the projects as a whole unusable for everyone including the other contributors.
Usually I would prefer to use a very permissive license like the MIT license because it's very common in web development in general and that's where I work. But in the context of the RC hobby I would recommend the usage of the GPL license which is also used by OpenTX and BetaFlight (and, by extension, all their forks). The main impact of the GPL license is that any modification of the code must also be published under the GPL license, meaning than all derived work is forced to be open source. The implicit goal is to motivate the usage of open source. I think this license is a better choice in an ecosystem where that's clearly not the most common practice. See also choosealicense.com which has some explanation about the different licenses.
Please note that this legal change should normally require the approval of all the major contributors of the project.
As someone that is familiar with the open source ecosystem in software development since many years I stay at your disposal to discuss the implications if you wish so.
Hello,
Despite the popularity of these repositories holding firmware code I can see none of them have a proper open source license.
The implications of not using a license are explained here. Basically it means that all contributors have exclusive right on the code they created and any of them could claim exclusive usage on their part of the code, thus making the projects as a whole unusable for everyone including the other contributors.
Usually I would prefer to use a very permissive license like the MIT license because it's very common in web development in general and that's where I work. But in the context of the RC hobby I would recommend the usage of the GPL license which is also used by OpenTX and BetaFlight (and, by extension, all their forks). The main impact of the GPL license is that any modification of the code must also be published under the GPL license, meaning than all derived work is forced to be open source. The implicit goal is to motivate the usage of open source. I think this license is a better choice in an ecosystem where that's clearly not the most common practice. See also choosealicense.com which has some explanation about the different licenses.
Please note that this legal change should normally require the approval of all the major contributors of the project.
As someone that is familiar with the open source ecosystem in software development since many years I stay at your disposal to discuss the implications if you wish so.