On 22/08/2012 15:05, Byron Blue wrote:
We are considering moving our operating system to the Linux environment. Our product is a commercial OMNI sonar system used throughout the world in the commercial fishing industry. The software itself and upgrades are free of charge to the user. Of course, my choice for the compiler would be GCC. I should initially point out that I am unfamiliar with both Linux and therefore GCC.
Gcc is very popular on all operating systems, not just Linux. If it is of help during testing, development, or the move to Linux, then you might like to get a copy for Windows (assuming that is your old environment) - google for the "mingw" gcc build. Converting your application to build using gcc on Windows may let you split the task into two steps.
This is the question: GCC uses the GNU license scheme. This operating system would be embedding in our industrial computers and I do not (of course) want the source code for our operating system to be open source - available to our competitors.
When you say "operating system", do you really mean your application? /Linux/ is an "operating system", as is Windows, QNX, etc. If you wrote your own operating system, then you don't need Linux.
The operating system has its own license - in the case of Linux, this is GPL2. This means that you /do/ have to make all the source code for your Linux installation available to your customers (and likely therefore also your competitors). However, it's not code that /you/ wrote, and it is not secret anyway - everyone can download it. So you've lost nothing.
For your own application code, you can license it exactly as you want. The licence of the OS does not affect it, nor does the license for the compiler (well, technically the license of gcc /does/ affect it - in that it explicitly says that you can use whatever licence you want). So you can be as secret or open as you want for your own source code.
Be aware that some libraries may restrict your licensing. But that applies anyway regardless of the OS or compiler.
If you are writing code such as device drivers that link directly to the Linux kernel, then there are other licensing issues. But those are connected to Linux, rather than the compiler, so there are better places to discuss them (such as the comp.os.linux.embedded newsgroup).
The GNU site is not quite clear in this area and being new I would not want to "break the rules". Could I ask you for a bit of clarification on this issue? Thank you for your time and efforts, Byron Blue Software Engineering MAQ Sonar
