which licenses are allowed for OpenBMC projects

[Wim Vervoorn]

Hello Kurt,

I guess I'll have to dive in to it a bit deeper.

Basically we have two situations:
1) We create a custom layer that is under BSD or a custom license (not GPL2)
2) In a layer we pull in a repository that either provide code that is BSD or custom licensed or even binary blobs.

Best Regards,
Wim Vervoorn


-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Taylor [mailto:kurt.r.taylor at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2019 9:11 PM
To: Wim Vervoorn <wvervoorn at eltan.com>
Cc: openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org
Subject: Re: which licenses are allowed for OpenBMC projects

The best answer is: it depends. I would recommend checking with your legal team on what you will be able to do for your custom product implementation.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but generally speaking, you can pull in other "packages" without worry about them being viral infected. The term "parts" can mean many things, you will need to figure out whether just code is being pulled into a existing tree with a different license, or if you are talking about shipping an additional package with your product.

Open source licenses and their viral effects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license
https://www.toptal.com/open-source/developers-guide-to-open-source-licenses

Kurt Taylor (krtaylor)

On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 4:51 AM Wim Vervoorn <wvervoorn at eltan.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
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>
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> I have a non-technical question about the OpenBMC project.
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> If we create a custom implementation for an OpenBMC project which we deliver to a customer can we include parts that are under a BSD or a proprietary license? In this case the Yocto files would be in the tree but the code pulled in could be binary or a BSD repository?
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>
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> For us it’s important to make sure we understand correctly what the possibilities are.
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> Best regards,
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> Wim Vervoorn
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>