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On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Stephen Williams wrote: > rj@eli.elilabs.com said: > > Why does an embedded system impose special considerations for > > licensing? If you are concerned about distribution in binary only > > form, this is allowed, provided that you give a reference to where the > > source may be found. > > This is pushing the envelope, because the customer that buys a toaster > with a ROM filled with GPLed software has no means to modify that ROM. > There is in practice no "preferred form of the work for making modifications > to it" because the customer has not been given the means to load a > modification, or even link it. Nor can he. Likely, special hardware is > required, possibly not available to anyone other then the toaster maker. I agree that this is very likely the case for MOST applications. But does the LGPL force you to still distribute your application in a form that would require you to go through the effort to make it available anyway. To me, the tiniest risk is too much. Remember, I wear two hats -- as one I am an application developer and I would have to let my customer evaluate the license of packages embedded in their system. A decision there implacts 1 user/application. The rest of the time I wear the RTEMS hat and a decision there impacts many more people. So I tend to be cautious. I do not want to force any work on an RTEMS user in regards to meeting license requirements than I have to. One of the original reasons for the RTEMS project was to avoid per system royalties since it is such a pain accounting-wise. The royalties were offensive but having to track that over the often 20+ year of a fielded weapon system was a problem to the Missile Command. I still have to ask, "If the GPL or LGPL can be satisfied by an application (embedded or otherwise) without any special considerations by the developers, then why do libgcc and the gnat run-time have special exceptions?" --joel Joel Sherrill Director of Research & Development joel@OARcorp.com On-Line Applications Research Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS Huntsville AL 35805 Support Available (205) 722-9985