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
Good points. The current state of licenses in the git repo is confusing. The “GPS” folder is AgOpenGPS itself, and as I understand it Brian switched it from the GPL to MIT. There is no license file at all in the AgIO directory. So maybe that means it defaults to GPLv3? Hard to know. Might be worth bringing this up in its own topic.
As you say, things are a bit murkier with the Arduino sketches, since they use third-party libraries.
Definitely there are pitfalls to open source licensing. Any company wishing to use open source code in their project, including code from IsoAgStack-plus-plus, should talk with their own lawyers about it first to make sure they can comply with the license.
The only real way to actually validate it that I know of is to become a member of AEF and license their conformance test (at considerable expense I might add). Since we’re just open source contributors, we don’t have the funds to do this by ourselves, so we have to rely on following the documents as close as possible and testing with the limited implements at our disposal.
If someone did eventually conformance test our stack and submit any issues to us, we would of course address them, as we want to be conformant.
But, even if our stack had previously been AEF conformance tested, they (AEF) actually require testing each product not the stack, so even if our stack was 100% conformant, that’s not enough to put the ISOBUS conformance attestation or logo on any product that consumes it, unless that product also is conformance tested. So it’s quite a rabbit hole to validate these things.
Completely agree, and it can be fairly nuanced as well. Our stack’s license for example depends slightly on what CAN driver you use. Some of our drivers are MIT, and the main stack is MIT, but some drivers are not, and linking against those in an application can have legal implications in a closed source project. Using the PEAK PCAN driver for example requires also agreeing to PEAK’s license. It’s always best to find out from a lawyer what needs to be done if you’re going to use an open source library in a commercial (and especially closed source) project.