From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Arnout Vandecappelle Date: Fri, 09 May 2014 22:47:06 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] [Question] Is it ok to change Buildroot for own needs? In-Reply-To: <536CA3D7020000460004F5B8@gwia2.rz.hs-offenburg.de> References: <536CA3D7020000460004F5B8@gwia2.rz.hs-offenburg.de> Message-ID: <536D3ECA.9050905@mind.be> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net On 09/05/14 09:45, Frank Ihle wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'm not a Pro, when it comes to the license of someone's other Software. > Basically I'd like to add a new menu that includes some of the Target packages. > Is it ok for "Buildroot" if i change it like this ? Buildroot is under the GPL license. That means you are allowed to modify it in any way that you want. However, if you redistribute (= give it to someone else in any way) buildroot, you have to: * also give the source (of buildroot, not necessarily of the packages; * indicate that you've modified buildroot. Redistributing the generated images doesn't count as redistributing buildroot (at least we don't think it does). However, if the generated image contains any GPL software, e.g. busybox, then *that* license also requires you to provide the source of busybox, as well as any scripts required to build it. We think that buildroot is such a script. In other words, when you redistribute the images and it contains GPL software, we think that you have to provide your modified source of buildroot as well. Note that I'm not a lawyer and none of this has a precedent in court AFAIK. Regards, Arnout -- Arnout Vandecappelle arnout at mind be Senior Embedded Software Architect +32-16-286500 Essensium/Mind http://www.mind.be G.Geenslaan 9, 3001 Leuven, Belgium BE 872 984 063 RPR Leuven LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoutvandecappelle GPG fingerprint: 7CB5 E4CC 6C2E EFD4 6E3D A754 F963 ECAB 2450 2F1F