From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <51A32CE7.8010309@control.lth.se> Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 11:52:39 +0200 From: Anders Blomdell MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <1369479458.60083.YahooMailNeo@web172203.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> <51A0FE20.5040202@control.lth.se> <201305260224.59809.leo@alaxarxa.net> <20130526070035.3B231383193@gemini.denx.de> In-Reply-To: <20130526070035.3B231383193@gemini.denx.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Xenomai] Xenomai, rtnet and ethercat List-Id: Discussions about the Xenomai project List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Wolfgang Denk Cc: Franz Engel , xenomai@xenomai.org On 2013-05-26 09:00, Wolfgang Denk wrote: > Dear Leopold Palomo Avellaneda, > > In message <201305260224.59809.leo@alaxarxa.net> you wrote: >> >> My recommendation is that if you don't want to make a commercial product, or >> sell your software, you can use any of the two ethercat master: soem and >> etherlab. I don't think that Beckhoff makes you problems. If you want to do any >> commercial product, ask to Beckoff first. > > The license terms make no such difference. As soon as you distribute > any such system (no matter if commercial or otherwise, even for free) > you are violating the terms. > It's even worse than that, you are not even allowed to use it internally without signing the EtherCAT license. At 2007 when ethercat.org was still stating that EtherCAT was GPL compatible/friendly, we wrote an EtherCAT master in realtime Java ([1], [2]). After having completed that when we were about to release it to the world, we were told by Beckhoff that in order to distribute or use it (even internal use!), we had to sign the Beckhoff license (hence that project was scrapped!). The GPL wording was also removed from the EtherCAT site at this time (the whole process of triyng to get the licensing right took almost two year, after this time we finally got an answer from Gerd Hoppe [3]). Regards Anders [1] http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/cs/Personal/Sven_Gestegard_Robertz/publ/jtres-flexpicker.pdf [2] http://youtu.be/xH1yUXd9krU?t=3m47s [3] Excerpt from email 2009-04-08: "Therefore, any use of EtherCAT requires a license in addition to a copyright license for code such as L/GPL, regardless of any split of code in a licensed part and a L/GPL part." -- Anders Blomdell Email: anders.blomdell@control.lth.se Department of Automatic Control Lund University Phone: +46 46 222 4625 P.O. Box 118 Fax: +46 46 138118 SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden