DM42

[Thomas Okken]

(01-08-2018 12:52 PM)emece67 Wrote:  

(01-07-2018 07:19 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  The DM42 firmware is based on Free42, and since Free42 is GPL-licensed, SwissMicros must make their version of the code available to anyone who purchases a DM42.

They must make available all the code inside the DM42 or only the code derived from Free42?

That's a tricky question to answer, but I think the consensus is that the GPL covers the entire executable, but not anything outside the executable.

So, it covers the changes made to Free42 that support the big screen, but the parts of that big-screen drawing that take place not in the Free42 process but in the OS (in other words, the DM42 equivalent of the Windows Graphic Device Interface, GTK, MacOS Quartz, etc.) could be proprietary, closed source.

That is a bit of an over-simplification, though. I know there have been long and tricky discussions over this issue regarding the separation between the Linux kernel and kernel modules, for instance. Simply moving code to a dynamically-linked library does not necessarily make it "not part of the code." The full text of the GPL is long in part because capturing the desired ethos in legalese is hard.