On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Chris Friesen wrote:
Richard B. Johnson wrote:
No. Accompany it with a written offer to __provide__ the source
code for any GPL stuff they used (like the kernel or drivers).
Anything at the application-level is NOT covered by the GPL.
They do not have to give away their trade-secrets.
GPL'd applications would still be covered by the GPL, no?
You mean like `ls` and `init` ??? Sure. I don't think any serious
embedded stuff would use that, though. Typically an embedded
system would start with a new application called 'init'. It
wouldn't use a SYS-V startup and certainly wouldn't have a shell.
The new init would do everything including mounting any file-
systems and initializing networking all by itself without
any help from the usual applications. It might fork-off a few
different tasks to handle different things. For instance,
the system shown probably handles the furnace and air-conditioner
as a separate task. The shades and blinds are probably another
and, certainly, communicating with the robot that mows the lawn
would require a separate task just to handle GPS.
If I buy their product, I should be able to ask them for the source to
all GPL'd entities that are present in the system, including the kernel,
drivers, and all GPL'd userspace apps.
Any *new* apps that they wrote they would of course be free to keep private.
Yep.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.11 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
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