28 Feb
2014
28 Feb
'14
9:59 p.m.
My code has been in development, and for various
reasons--the largest
being the desire for transmit support--I have developed my own HW
abstraction layer called SDRIO. At the moment, I support rtl-sdr,
bladeRF, and Funcube Dongle devices via the abstraction layer. The
layer will, of course, be GNU licensed and thus free for anyone to
modify or extend.
There are many GNU licences with differing terms, so this will depend
on which GNU licence you select. If you choose LGPL for example, then
what you propose isn't a problem. But if you choose GPL, I believe that
what you want to achieve may not be permitted.
My intent is thus for SDRIO to live in the same niche
as ExtIO and
thus have the blessings of the developers. I'm aware that you cannot
give legal advice; my hope is only that, if someone comes to me
saying I violated the rtl-sdr license, that at least I can tell them
that I've talked with the lead developers and that they've given me
the same permissions as the ExtIO developers.
I'm not a developer on this project (nor a lawyer), but I will point out
an entry from the GPL FAQ[1]:
If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean
that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a
GPL-compatible license?
Yes, because the software as it is actually run includes the
library.
This means that if you release your library under the GPL, then your
entire program must also be released under the GPL. If you wanted to
use your SDRIO system with a closed source program, you would need to
release it under the LGPL.
However since librtlsdr is released under the GPL, you don't have a
choice here and must release any code using librtlsdr as GPL also.
There is one possible way out, however. Since you are the developer,
you are able to dual-licence your own code. This means you can dual
licence SDRIO as both GPL (to keep librtlsdr happy) and some other more
permissive licence, and use the other licence yourself to link it with
your closed-source program.
This means however that you would not be able to distribute your program
with librtlsdr (because then the GPL licence would take precedence),
just like ExtIO programs do not include open-source ExtIO modules and
require users to install them separately.
In other words, your program must be functional and usable without any
of the GPL'd SDRIO modules present. Users can add these themselves to
provide more functionality, but if you require any GPL'd SDRIO modules
to be present in order for your program to be usable, then it is clear
that the SDRIO system only exists to circumvent the requirements of the
various licences and would be legally questionable.
Perhaps you would consider releasing all your code under the GPL
instead, for the benefit of everyone?
Cheers,
Adam.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL