In the ISOBUS++ Virtual terminal thread, a gentleman from FJDynamics joined and commented about the companies work / interest. He was asked if FJDynamics would be open sourcing their work if they based on or used ISOBUS++. He replied they most likely would not. An off topic discussion ensued about AOG licensing. A quick review of the AOG repositories revealed the below regarding licensing. It was mentioned a separate topic on licensing might be a better place for discussion so here it is.
The license in the root AOG directory is GPL v3. The license in the GPS directory is MIT. A search of the entire AgOpenGPS repository does not show any license embedded into the source files.
The root AOG boards repository does not list a license file. The source files have a a mix of MIT, CERN, GPLv2, COO and snippets of licenses.
Overall it is hard to tell what license the various authors of the code intend for their works.
GPL v3 recommends placing the “short form” of the GPL license in every source file. The instructions on what to include are near the bottom of the GPL v3 license. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
I just spoke with Brian and he confirmed it is still, in fact, GPLv3. And two different license files in the SourceCode folder state that. And the about dialog box in AOG itself also says that. However there is a license file in the GPS directory that says MIT that probably should be removed. But the intention is GPLv3.
I like the idea of putting a header in each file. I will do that with the Qt code base.
Yes, the short form of the GPLv3 is recommended to be at the top of every source file. Where I use to work we had a server bot that checked every source file in our repositories for the company approved license at the top of every source file. It added the license to files that did not have the company approved license. Also, the development environments had a macro that added the company approved license to the top of every new file created in the IDE.
What’s best for a hardware design? From my own research, the CERN-OHL license is written specifically for hardware (OHL Open Hardware License). GPL doesn’t really apply to hardware. MIT isn’t as specific for hardware. I’m not familiar with COO.