The commercial option
Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2011 12:57 pm
Hi,
Starting from today ChibiOS/RT is also available under a commercial licensing scheme. I wish to make clear some points for numerous GPL users and contributors:
I hope that the commercial option will give advantage to the free users too, advantages like access to commercial-grade code and hopefully a faster growing project.
Commercial users will have the advantage to be able to evaluate the real product before having to commit, the FOSS structure of the project will also ensure that the code has been scrutinized by a lot of people.
Giovanni
Starting from today ChibiOS/RT is also available under a commercial licensing scheme. I wish to make clear some points for numerous GPL users and contributors:
- ChibiOS/RT is and will always be available under the GPL with linking exception.
- The commercial and free versions are identical (may only be temporarily out of sync if some commercial user received priority hot fixes), we also kept the same name in order to make this point very clear. The free ChibiOS/RT is not some cut down or reduced version, version numbers are the same for the free and commercial versions.
- The difference for commercial users can be summarized in the following points:
- No advertise clause, commercial users don't have to advertise the use of ChibiOS/RT into their product nor have to provide the ChibiOS/RT code should somebody ask for it.
- GPL3-free, the code is completely cleaned from any reference to the GPL3 license.
- Better support options.
- Ability to modify/fix/improve the source code. Users of the GPL3+exception license are not allowed to do so.
- No advertise clause, commercial users don't have to advertise the use of ChibiOS/RT into their product nor have to provide the ChibiOS/RT code should somebody ask for it.
I hope that the commercial option will give advantage to the free users too, advantages like access to commercial-grade code and hopefully a faster growing project.
Commercial users will have the advantage to be able to evaluate the real product before having to commit, the FOSS structure of the project will also ensure that the code has been scrutinized by a lot of people.
Giovanni