On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 08:07 -0400, Wes Kussmaul wrote: > Are you suggesting that if you embed software in a hardware product, > it's no longer software? > > The GPL most certainly applies to embedded versions of software > products > which it licenses. > > If that were not true then I would be able to put any GPLed software > onto a USB thumb drive and call it exempt.
I don't think so. What he is stating is that someone can provided the GPLed software that they use on their embedded system and then it may be possible or not possible for you to run your own modified versions on their hardware. I believe it is okay to create a "disti" that runs on a device with proprietary code and license only that "disti". You can download the GPL software from the project but you would not be allowed to download the proprietary code. This would make it virtually impossible for you to run your stuff on that device. For example. On one of my devices I have a loader that runs in initrd. That loader is owned by me. Without that loader you still could load the GPL code into memory but you would have to recreate the work that my loader does. People that write real embedded devices don't use 100% GPL software. I know I don't. I would suspect that I could use 50% GPL and 50% stuff I write my own. So in order to recreate my effort to 100% you would have to make a similar investment in work. As far as OpenSSL license is concerned I've not had a problem with it. It is fine. I think some people believe that if you run any code on Linux that the code must be GPL. That is not true. So this is where you may have issues trying to get code from companies that create embedded devices based on Linux. Not all the code is straight from the community. Some of it is written by paid employees and belongs to the organization. ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
