Re: [Bluez-devel] BlueZ and licensing issues

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>]

Hi Pierre-Yves,

> From the informations I was able to gather, up to today, everything
> released by the BlueZ project has been released under the GPL, and
> they're discussion about a LGPL release of bluez-libs in the future, if
> Qualcomm does agree with that as one of the copyright holders.

That is fully correct. I never did any release with LGPL so far.

> My question: has BlueZ ever released to a person or a company a copy of
> bluez-libs under another license than the GPL? It seems that they're
> companies around (at least one I know of) that are distributing/selling
> products linked against the libs (according to ldd), under a very
> proprietary license - nothing looking like the GPL, and not accompanied
> by the required notices and source code offerings. I'm wondering if some
> have been granted an "exception" allowing them to do so legally.

I haven't granted an exception for my parts of the code so far. The
bluez-libs was and is GPL for everybody. No special treatment.

> Is it right that to date, the only way to use BlueZ in a non-GPL
> licensed project is to communicate with it through some kind of IPC
> (like TomTom did with their TTMP lib, or now with the dbus API exposed
> by hcid)?

That is correct. Especially the BlueZ D-Bus API is designed to make
Bluetooth easy and help third-party people to use it.

> I'm trying to clearly understand the situation from the licensing point
> of view, for possible use of BlueZ in a non-GPL project, thus those
> questions. Any useful comment on that matter would be much appreciated.

You can't link the Bluetooth library from a non-GPL program. This might
change at some point in the future, but for now you simply can't.

Regards

Marcel



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