Hi there, I'd address you with an honorific and your surname, but I am too ignorant to infer correct ones from the name shown in your email. I'm sorry about that. At 2024-02-06T19:03:41+0900, Jiyoung Wee wrote: > I have a request about Debian License Policy. > > This is our case. > 1. For the OS for our appliance product, we use "A" OS(tentative name). > 2. "A" OS is based on Debian OS. > 3. We only modify "lsb_release" information so that the OS name,"A" OS, > shows instead of Debian OS when commanded. > 4. We install PSU, RAID, NIC drivers on the OS. > 5. Other than that, we do not customize Debian OS. > 6. We sell our appliance product to end-users. > > Do we have the right to use Debian OS freely based on the GNU General > Public License? Would you please guide us whether we are using the > Debian OS illegally or not? I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I did work alongside others in FLOSS licensing compliance team for several years for a Silicon Valley company with a recognizable name, in an advisory engineering capacity to the firm's legal counsel. Do not expect anything any non-attorney, including me, tells you to reduce your liability or exposure to damages in the event you fail, or are found by a court to have failed, to honor the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and other copyright licenses--there are many--under which the software in the Debian system is distributed. The first thing I will say is that if you are going to operate in a commercial capacity in the United States, I cannot urge you strongly enough to obtain competent legal counsel with relevant training and/or experience in copyright law. The Debian Project is not licensed to practice law, and you are asking for legal advice. Pretty much the same goes for any other jurisdiction you might be operating in. Attorneys-at-law licensed to practice in the places where you do business are the people from whom you should be obtaining answers to your questions. That established, as an educated lay person I will offer you some nudges in what I believe to be "the right direction". (Bear in mind that free advice is worth what you pay for it.) Points 1, 2, and 3 seem less likely than the others to lead to problems. Differentiating your product by name in the marketplace is a good idea under trademark law, a subject for which you should _also_ obtain competent counsel. Copyright and trademark law are distinct matters. Point 5 is worth noting. Understand that (as a rule) refraining from modifications does not release you from your obligation to provide complete corresponding source code to those portions of the product that are licensed under the GNU GPL or a similar copyleft. Claiming that you got a program in binary form from someplace else and did not change it does not shift your responsibility elsewhere. You still must supply complete corresponding source code, including scripts used to direct the compilation and assembly of things like binary product, such as firmware images flashed to an embedded device, where source code licensed under GNU GPL, and some other licenses, is involved. Point 6 is also worthy of comment. Whether you convey copyrighted code to another party in exchange for payment generally does not reduce your obligations under copyright law or license. This principle is not restricted to things like Free/Libre/Open Source software (FLOSS) licenses; it goes just as well for Blu-Ray discs of Hollywood films. Your civil and/or criminal liability is not necessarily diminished if you do not profit by your activity. Your commercial exploitation of material copyrighted by third parties, however, _could_ increase the damages assessed you in the event of a civil lawsuit. Point 4 is the most noteworthy because in my opinion it is the most potentially hazardous yet also most easily overlooked. Everything I've said above that applies to FLOSS software also applies to proprietary binary drivers (or "blobs"). These are, generally, copyrightable as well, and frequently under restrictive terms; their owners may regard their source code as a trade secret. You must not only be mindful of combining them with materials licensed under so-called "strong copylefts" like the GNU GPL (which may be impossible without infringing one copyright license or the other), but also of the terms under which you received them from your supplier, whose contract with you or terms of sale may be particularized to your firm. I've already said that you need a lawyer to answer these questions, and the point is even more emphatic for this case. I would add, given popular misconceptions in the industry, that even if you avoid "copyleft" licenses entirely, meaning any license that imposes an obligation to disclose source code, there remain numerous FLOSS projects whose licenses, while more "permissive", still require the disclosure of their presence and attribution of correct copyright notices in product documentation (or in the product itself). I recall that at least one applicable civil case has been litigated on this point, and won by the plaintiffs. (If someone on debian-project can help me remember which case(s) I'm thinking of, I'd appreciate the reminder.) If you distribute materials held in copyright by another party, you need advice from a copyright lawyer, full stop. I recommend studying the following article, particularly if you need to convince someone in your commercial enterprise to initiate a line item in the budget for legal services, and they have been reluctant to do so. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/16/vizio_gpl_contract/ I repeat: you need professional legal counsel to answer your questions. I do not warrant that any of my colleagues in Debian will agree with me. However, I did present on this topic at a Debian conference and escaped the room without damage from hurled vegetable matter. https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/226/ Best of luck in your endeavors! Regards, Branden
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature