Objective Development Forums

Hi all,

Would anyone be able to advise me on weather it would be OK to sell hardware that was pre-programmed with the V-USB software (with of cause the full hardware and software published and freely available) without a commercial license?

The intent of this would of cause be selling the hardware NOT the software, the hardware it's self being designed to be easily reprogrammable by the user.

One concern that I have is that a significant portion of the users might not have the skills or knowledge required to reprogram the devices, which would not stand very well morally, but what is the legal stance on this?

Regards,

TalkingJazz,

There's no problem from a legal point of view. We might even set a link to your shop, if the board is A Good Thing.

TalkingJazz wrote:One concern that I have is that a significant portion of the users might not have the skills or knowledge required to reprogram the devices, which would not stand very well morally

How so? When have e.g. you last compiled Linux, X, glibc, gcc, Gnome, KDE, Symbian, ... ? Or made changes to these? The point with free software is that the users have the possibility to change it. Ability is left as an exercise for the reader

The genius of the dual-licensing model (like V-USB's) is that the software (or code) is available for free for anyone to use, under the GPL, but those free users have to in turn give out ALL their source code out to anyone who buys their products, meaning if the developer added anything particularly innovative, they have to essentially give away the rights to that intellectual property to whoever buys their product. This means anyone who buys the device/software is then able to use it free and give it to anyone they want to. For example, in the mid-ninties, Red Hat was still selling their version of Linux (that they put a lot of additional code into) in stores for real money, but it was totally legal for anyone to copy and sell as many Red Hat Linux CDs as they wanted.

So the beauty of the dual-licensing model is that if you don't want to have to give away the secret of your innovations, you can pay for a proprietary license and then you don't have to share your code, and can sue the pants off anyone who is copying your software/firmware.

Plus, if you're personally bothered by the idea that people wouldn't have the skill to reprogram their devices, you could always add a USB bootloader, especially HIDBoot, so reprogramming the device is simple as "hold a button down when you're plugging the device in to enter bootloader mode, then use these tools to put new firmware on the board". That's my approach, since I'm making a consumer device but want my users (who probably have zero embedded programming experience) to be able to easily mess around with the device's code, and want to be able to give my users additional functionality via firmware updates/replacements.