[Bluez-devel] BlueZ and licensing issues

[Bluez-devel] BlueZ and licensing issues

[Pierre-Yves Paulus]

Hello,

>>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.

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.

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)?

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.

Best Regards,
Pierre-Yves Paulus







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Re: [Bluez-devel] BlueZ and licensing issues

[Marcel Holtmann]

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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