BlueZ and licensing issues

Bluez-devel Pierre-Yves Paulus 2 participants 2 messages Jun 23, 2006 Bluetooth drivers

lore

Share & tools

lore

Pierre-Yves Paulus

author

2006-06-23 06:58 UTC #0 lore raw

Hello,

Quoted 1 line

Quoted 1 line
From the informations I was able to gather, up to today, everything

released by the BlueZ project has been released under the GPL, and they're discussion about a LGPL release of bluez-libs in the future, if Qualcomm does agree with that as one of the copyright holders.

My question: has BlueZ ever released to a person or a company a copy of bluez-libs under another license than the GPL? It seems that they're companies around (at least one I know of) that are distributing/selling products linked against the libs (according to ldd), under a very proprietary license - nothing looking like the GPL, and not accompanied by the required notices and source code offerings. I'm wondering if some have been granted an "exception" allowing them to do so legally.

Is it right that to date, the only way to use BlueZ in a non-GPL licensed project is to communicate with it through some kind of IPC (like TomTom did with their TTMP lib, or now with the dbus API exposed by hcid)?

I'm trying to clearly understand the situation from the licensing point of view, for possible use of BlueZ in a non-GPL project, thus those questions. Any useful comment on that matter would be much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Pierre-Yves Paulus

Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_______________________________________________
Bluez-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bluez-devel

Marcel Holtmann

maintainer

2006-06-23 08:08 UTC #1 lore raw

Hi Pierre-Yves,

Quoted 4 lines

From the informations I was able to gather, up to today, everything released by the BlueZ project has been released under the GPL, and they're discussion about a LGPL release of bluez-libs in the future, if Qualcomm does agree with that as one of the copyright holders.

That is fully correct. I never did any release with LGPL so far.

Quoted 7 lines

My question: has BlueZ ever released to a person or a company a copy of bluez-libs under another license than the GPL? It seems that they're companies around (at least one I know of) that are distributing/selling products linked against the libs (according to ldd), under a very proprietary license - nothing looking like the GPL, and not accompanied by the required notices and source code offerings. I'm wondering if some have been granted an "exception" allowing them to do so legally.

I haven't granted an exception for my parts of the code so far. The bluez-libs was and is GPL for everybody. No special treatment.

Quoted 4 lines

Is it right that to date, the only way to use BlueZ in a non-GPL licensed project is to communicate with it through some kind of IPC (like TomTom did with their TTMP lib, or now with the dbus API exposed by hcid)?

That is correct. Especially the BlueZ D-Bus API is designed to make Bluetooth easy and help third-party people to use it.

Quoted 3 lines

I'm trying to clearly understand the situation from the licensing point of view, for possible use of BlueZ in a non-GPL project, thus those questions. Any useful comment on that matter would be much appreciated.

You can't link the Bluetooth library from a non-GPL program. This might change at some point in the future, but for now you simply can't.

Regards

Marcel