Hi there

can it be possible to use Armbian in a electronic embedded products since GPLV3 keep necessary opensourcing in the source code 

can you confirm that this is GPLV3 which  rules armbian  and 'tivoisation' is not possible with armbian

 

Best regards

 

Our major part, the build script, is issued under GPLv2 while the output, bootable image, we would need to make a research.

 

Nevertheless Armbian is used in commercial project regardless of a licence type. In ideal world this would be moral first, legal second question: "If you make money with help of our work, give us some too." Few did this way.

 

I am / was thinking on whether GPLv2 is the right way for this project, but am not too qualified in this area. Perhaps to move into dual or triple licencing, Mozilla? 

What are good and bad things and can we just change the licence?

Most of sunxi legacy kernels and some of u-boot builds are not "clean" in terms of GPL license since they contain linked binaries without sources. In any case GPL license is not simple and there are some exceptions and workarounds for publishing sources requirements (i.e. "system libraries").

What are good and bad things and can we just change the licence?

I don't see any reasons to change the license for the build script, but it may be necessary to change it for some prebuilt images, but I'm not an expert in this licensing stuff.

Hi there

can it be possible to use Armbian in a electronic embedded products since GPLV3 keep necessary opensourcing in the source code 

can you confirm that this is GPLV3 which  rules armbian  and 'tivoisation' is not possible with armbian

 

Best regards

 

How is blocking tivoization a bad thing? I've built commercial products on the OrangePi PC, the relevant project is on github with a nice little bash script to install & configure it all, but the thing is, if you design your business model well, having tivoized hardware is not useful or beneficial.

 

Red Hat and other giants have gotten this far without Tivoizing their offerings, and the only businesses intent on doing so are either doing it to protect a weak business model, or arcane reasons that generally do not make sense and will not generate extra revenue.

you can run proprietary code under linux.

for details see here:

 

http://www.datamation.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3801396_3/Bruce-Perens-Combining-GPL-and-Proprietary-Software.htm

 

http://www.barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/How-To/Embedded-Linux-GPL-License

 

and the definitive guide:

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html

 

So all the onus of developing and maintaining your code is on you.

Nobody will be able to make your product better.

It will be difficult to interface and integrate.

It will have limited success in its niche.

Then it will die.

 

Or you could open source it.,,,

Or you could open source it.,,,

 

So you are saying that GPLv3 is not open source license?

No, the OP wanted a way to have a proprietary embedded system based on armbian.

I showed him links on how to do this, but I also wanted him to consider the alternative of

putting the device in open source.

Oh, sorry. I mixed up who wrote what.

No, the OP wanted a way to have a proprietary embedded system based on armbian.

I showed him links on how to do this, but I also wanted him to consider the alternative of

putting the device in open source.

I mean, the most serious issue I see on the business side is how do you successfully tivoize an H3 based board? You'd need secureboot & a battery backed secure case, like the HP G1 AIO PCs offer. I configure them with Debian and the relevant secureboot keys, if the case is opened while it is on or off/unplugged, or the OS is altered, it will refuse to boot. Mainly this is done to ensure customer data is secure, along with helping our customers pass any potential PCI compliance audits.

 

On the software side, you are just shooting yourself in the foot. Two companies can beneficially work on the same project and end up with completely different end products, or compete in the same market and end up with very different, uniquely tailored applications (Chrome vs Safari).