[etherlab-users] Etherlab Licence and software which builds against it

[Florian Pose]

Hi,

Am 25.07.2012 09:50, schrieb Mike O'Connor:
> For the last months, I've been working on a project to build a low level
> interface to EtherCAT equipment using the EtherLab master code as a base.
> 
> I was about to put the code up on github and I realised that I had not
> double checked the requirements for the license. We where looking to
> release our code under a BSD like license as we are not running code in
> the kernel and when we do it would still pass the results to a real time
> user land process. (so the kernel code could be GPL)
> 
> But looking at EtherLab master license its under the GPL (not LGPL)
> meanong (as I understand it) because we link with the code we would have
> to release under GPL.

If you link against the master code (kernel code) itself, or use the
master code as base for further development, your code has to be also
GPLv2. If you link against the master's userspace library (LGPLv2), then
your code can be under any license.

> I do not have a problem with this but wanted to check before publishing
> the code.

If you do a derived work of GPLed code and do not respect the conditions
of the GPL (i. e. changing the license to BSD), you will violate the
license. Maybe the copyright holders have a problem with that. ;-)

-- 
Viele Grüße,
Florian