Sorry for the back-forth and the confusion. This topic doesn't come up very often here, and we are obviously not lawyers. You may want to try to track down an attorney in your organization to see what their take is on it. As it stands now, the sticking point is if the appliance you ship to your clients is considered 'public'. (I'm guessing it is.) If so, then you are required by the GPL to release any changes to lm-sensors you've made /and/ the source code of any binary which links to libsensors. At least that's how I understand it. I hope this helps. If you find more detail on your situation from an attorney, please come back and share it with us. Phil Subba wrote: > All I want to know is whether it is ok to link my application (which > will be installed > on an appliance we ship to our clients) with lm-sensors. > I don't want to commit any changes to lm-sensors code. > > > > Mark M. Hoffman wrote: > >> Hello: >> >> * Philip Edelbrock <phil at edgedesign.us> [2004-05-10 12:56:54 -0700]: >> >> >>> If there are license incompatibilities that can only be solved by >>> changing the license of lm-sensors, then the answer is almost >>> certainly 'No'. IANAL, but even if we went forward with making an >>> exception for you, we would need to track down all the copyright >>> holders that have touched lm-sensors and get explicit permission to >>> change the license for this exception. >>> (snip the rest) >>> >> >> >> (IANAL) >> >> Remember that the GPL only restricts release/redistribution (source >> and/or >> binaries). If you do not redistribute the results, you can link GPL'ed >> libraries to whatever you want: >> >> http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic >> >> >> >>> Subba wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>>> It is a legal question. >>>> I am asking becuase the README file has the following: >>>> >>>> Note that at this moment, libsensors falls under the GPL, not the >>>> LGPL. >>>> In more human language, that means it is FORBIDDEN to link any >>>> application >>>> to the library, even to the shared version, if the application itself >>>> does not fall under the GPL. This will probably be changed in the >>>> future. >>>> In the meantime, you will have to contact us first if you want to >>>> do this. >>>> >>> >> >> Regards, >> >> >> >
