[Buildroot] Buildroot licence for commercial product

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Hello Damien,

Warning: I am not a lawyer. I am not a licensing expert.

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:55:11 +0200
Damien Borie <dbe@terawatt.fr> wrote:

> We distribute a product which system is a Linux built with Buildroot.
> I have some question about Buildroot use for a commercial product :
> - as the system has been made with Buildroot, must I mention
> Buildroot with a url, display the licence or something like that in
> my application?

As Buildroot by itself isn't distributed, my understanding is that the
license doesn't require you to mention and distribute Buildroot
together with your product.

However, the GPL says (section 3) :

 ?
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable. 
 ?

And maybe we might see Buildroot as a part of the "scripts used to
control compilation and installation" of other GPL executables (Linux
kernel, Busybox and others).

I think we already had this discussion on the Buildroot list sometime
ago, and I think the consensus was that the main Buildroot contributors
considered that there was no distribution of Buildroot when selling a
product whose firmware was built using Buildroot and that consequently,
mentionning Buildroot and distributing its source code wasn't required.

> - I saw in another thread, if I understood well, that I must mention 
> licence and source code for all modules of the distribution. But what 
> does it means exactly? Must I put in my product file system every
> source code and licence of every installed programs? Must I put a
> visible link in my main application or can I only put everything in
> the file system without a clear access?

It depends on the individual license of each of the modules in your
distribution. There will probably be GPL parts, LGPL parts, MIT/X11/BSD
parts and parts under other licenses. Each license has its own set of
requirements associated to the act of distribution.

Generally speaking, for a GPLv2 module such as the Linux kernel or
Busybox, the requirements are well detailed in section 3 of the licence
(see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html). You may
also be interested by the "Distribution of programs released under the
GNU licenses" section of the GPL FAQ, at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html. You may also want to have a
look at the Practical Guide to GPL Compliance
<http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html>.

In terms of distribution, the LGPL license have fairly similar
requirements to the GPL. MIT/X11/BSD and other non-copyleft licenses
have fewer requirements, they basically only require attribution.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
development, consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com