VLC on a commercial hardware

[igorgv]

Hello all,

I'm an engineer for a design house in Brazil. We develop electronic products for industries to manufacture and commercialize them, like cameras, media players, broadcast professional equipment, STBs, etc.

One of our industrial clients wants us to develop a new security DVR system. This DVR has 3 different DSPs, two for audio/video encoding (not running Linux) and one ARM running embedded linux with various services..

The ARM which runs Linux will also be responsible for reading the H264 elementary stream produced by the other two DSPs and send it through the ethernet over RTSP.

It would be great for us to use VLC embedded in the ARM serving the RTSP stream, but GPL license would be a barrier. So I speak to my client and he said that they would accept to turn all the linux based firmware into GPL, since the company makes money selling the hardware, not the software. Obviously, the hardware schematics and layouts woudn't be GPL. The developed firmware would be, at the end of the project, published at the company's website, but the hardware is secret.

Is there any legal restriction to it? I mean, to comercialize an equipment which runs GPL'ed software?

Thanks in advance for the answers.

IGOR

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Be careful, GPL means that you need to open all software derivatives of the GPL.

Which means, that if you have a box with Linux and VLC on it, you need to GPL those. But they are already open source.

What you don't need to open is everything else you develop on that platform. You develop a special software running on Linux? No need to open source.

You have the rights to sell VLC, but you must be able to offer the source of VLC and your modifications of VLC to your users.

So, you can sell Linux+VLC+other stuffs running on VLC, but you just need to open source the modification you did to VLC and to Linux

[igorgv]

Hi j-b, thanks for the answer.

>>Be careful, GPL means that you need to open all software derivatives of the GPL.

>>Which means, that if you have a box with Linux and VLC on it, you need to
>>GPL those. But they are already open source.

>>What you don't need to open is everything else you develop on that platform. You develop a
>>special software running on Linux? No need to open source.

OK, but if this special software running on Linux is statically or dynamically linked to the VLC (includes the VLC headers -> uses VLC), then it must be open source, right? I saw people talking about it in another thread of this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44291&start=0&hilit=GPL+commercial

>>You have the rights to sell VLC, but you must be able to offer the source of VLC and your
>>modifications of VLC to your users.

>>So, you can sell Linux+VLC+other stuffs running on VLC, but you just need to open
>>source the modification you did to VLC and to Linux

That's great, but is this vision shared among all VLC developers?

Thanks,

IGOR

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

OK, but if this special software running on Linux is statically or dynamically linked to the VLC (includes the VLC headers -> uses VLC), then it must be open source, right? I saw people talking about it in another thread of this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44291&start=0&hilit=GPL+commercial

Yes, that is true, any software linked to VLC must be open source under GPL.

That's great, but is this vision shared among all VLC developers?

It is not a vision, it is legal stuffs.