SDR Touch and licensing

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Мартин Маринов martintzvetomirov at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 20:11:52 UTC 2013


Hi all,

I would like to congratulate you on the great job you did with rtl-sdr and
I am really admiring you work!

I am the developer of SDR Touch,

I received a copyright violation notice from one of the developers.

I wanted to point out that rtl_tcp_andro and SDR Touch are completely
separate binaries in the aggregate called SDRTouch.apk. They are never
linked together - neither before, nor after the unrar-ing of the apk onto
the user's Android device. They communicate via TCP. Once the installation
of the apk is over, the binaries and rtl_tcp_andro reside in completely
different directories on the Android device.

rtl_tcp_andro is a derivative work of rtl_tcp and is released under GPL2+ -
https://github.com/martinmarinov/rtl_tcp_andro- (In order to honour GPL you
can actually visit this webiste via the Help message that you see on SDR
Touch).

rtl_tcp_andro is merely started using Runtime.exec() command. It is never
linked - neither statically nor dynamically. Furthermore SDR Touch can
happily work without the local rtl_tcp and this is there only for user's
convenience. SDR Touch can function over the network without requiring a
local rtl_tcp.

Since SDR Touch and rtl_tcp are completely separate works, and the user is
aware of the license of rtl_tcp_andro and has access to its source code,
SDR Touch does not violate GPL2+. It is true they reside in the same
installer before being installed on the device, but this is allowed in GPL3
and is called an aggregate.

Does it make sense? Is there anything I can do so we can settle this issue
once and for all?

Thanks,
Martin
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