On Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 06:40:23AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote: > That's nonsense. It's certainly fine to ship GPLv3 software alongside > closed source code. You'll need to provide source for the GPL'ed parts > of course, but providing a set of self-contained GPLv3 programs > shouldn't force a vendor to open anything else. I will echo Jeff's "you should talk to a lawyer about this", and IANAL, but to share some of my own experiences on the matter from having to deal with this myself: A lot of how the GPL applies to your own software depends on how you distribute the binary form, and whether this combined non-GPL+GPL product would be viewed as a "derivative work" or a "mere aggregation". That's to say that if you are distributing a single installable firmware file for your router, and it contains GPL'd software, you would arguably need to provide source for the entire work generating the firmware file. And this isn't specific to v3 of the GPL either, AFAIK, it's kind of the point of the license to begin with. Similarly, an application that links against a GPL'd work is generally considered to be a derived work (since the resulting application contains portions of the GPL'd work), and thus the GPL would apply to the whole. I'm not sure the linking issue has been tried in court but I do think that the previous issue has been successfully argued. If on the other hand you have something a bit more modular, where the GPL'd component (or conversely the proprietary component) was not included in the firmware binary but was added/removed through some additional medium (i.e. packages from a cd-rom or download site), then you'd have a pretty strong argument for the "mere aggregation" status. Possibly also if you could show that the resulting firmware image was more like a medium for distribution (i.e. tarball or disk image) rather than software, but that's a really slippery slope and I don't know how well received that would be. sean -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-cifs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
