Customised SD image - licence requirements?

[matt789]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering about licence requirements when distributing a customised OS image.

I'm working on a non-commercial project and hoping to distribute a customised Raspbian SD image with pre-installed packages and configuration files for easy installation.

Does anybody have any advice on the licence considerations for this? I know that there's a lot of GPL software in the base Raspbian distribution but not exactly sure what requirements that places on us.

Also, do we need to take any care due to the proprietary components, such as Wolfram and Oracle Java?

Cheers!
Matt

[W. H. Heydt]

Also, do we need to take any care due to the proprietary components, such as Wolfram and Oracle Java?

Yes.

[Heater]

You need to take care of the license terms and conditions of each and every package included in Raspbian that you intend to redistribute. They are all covered by copyright law and all have their own licences with whatever terms and conditions.

[ejolson]

You need to take care of the license terms and conditions of each and every package included in Raspbian that you intend to redistribute. They are all covered by copyright law and all have their own licences with whatever terms and conditions.

The Wolfram license at

https://www.wolfram.com/legal/agreement ... pberry-pi/

reads, in part, as

Subject to the terms of this Agreement and Your acceptance thereof, WRI grants You a non-exclusive license to use the Product solely for personal or educational purposes on a Model A or Model B Raspberry Pi computer.

This seems to imply that it would not be okay for a company to buy a bunch of Pi 4B computers for use in their business and accidentally install full-fat Raspbian on them with Mathematica bundled.

On the other hand, a school IT support team setting up an image customised with additional software for home schooling and distance learning while quarantined seems more (but still not completely) in line with the license.

If I needed something like this, I would have students download an official image of Raspbian and then launch a separate customisation script that sets up tools for the school's web portal afterwards. That way the school would not have to host or distribute any of the licensed binaries themselves while students downloading them individually would clearly fall under both personal and educational use.

It would be a nice clarification whether it is okay if a school spins their own image of Raspbian with Mathematica included for their students to support instruction while they shelter at home.

[dickon]

Frankly, I'd be far, far more worried about Oracle than I would about Wolfram. Wolfram are unlikely to sue you into the ground for using their software; Oracle are.

Ghastly company. Bargepole territory.

[DougieLawson]

You should start with Raspbian Lite. Remove packages you don't need from that, then add just the packages you need to run your application.

Then working from that base look at whether there's anything with a funky licence that causes trouble.

[ejolson]

Frankly, I'd be far, far more worried about Oracle than I would about Wolfram. Wolfram are unlikely to sue you into the ground for using their software; Oracle are.

Ghastly company. Bargepole territory.

Unfortunately Wolfram used Java to build Mathematica, as did MapleSoft to build the competing computer algebra system called Maple. Even Google used Java (and Linux of course) to build Android. These decisions were made before Sun Microsystems was destroyed.

Going forward, it is important not to give any single entity too much control over an important resource. No matter how nice and well meaning that organisation is, after becoming influential any central authority will be targeted by political powers, criminals and bad actors. The most significant examples in history are the Jedi High Council as well as the Galactic Senate. Lesser examples include the Council of Ministers, the WHO and perhaps Java.

The damaging way the Java licensing arrangements have changed over time is why the GNU licenses are designed to be decentralised and irrevocable. Note that this foresight was not entirely prophecy on the part of Richard Stallman so much as the result of experience already obtained from the changing commercial licenses of the original version of emacs.

[hippy]

Subject to the terms of this Agreement and Your acceptance thereof, WRI grants You a non-exclusive license to use the Product solely for personal or educational purposes on a Model A or Model B Raspberry Pi computer.

This seems to imply that it would not be okay for a company to buy a bunch of Pi 4B computers for use in their business and accidentally install full-fat Raspbian on them with Mathematica bundled.

You may well be right but this is why the question really needs answering by someone well versed in licensing and distro distribution. I would argue the key phrase in there is "use the Product" and having it available isn't what I'd call using it. But I might be wrong because it's not my field either.

Ultimately, only courts and judges can settle any disagreements over what licensing terms actually mean. Even experts can only give opinions on how they believe a court or judge should or will see it.

[stan_qaz]

Maybe duck the whole licence and distribute issue by building an installer that is intended to be downloaded and run on a freshly installed OS on the Pi?

It does add a couple steps for the user but avoids so much potential grief it may be worth it.

[matt789]

Thanks for all your comments everyone.

I've started from the lite image instead. I don't need Mathematica and I can get by without Java for now, so that should sidestep the main nasties.

Even so, given the complexities that seem to surround this licensing situation and my lack of experience with distributing distributions, I think I may go down the installer/customisation script route. The project is primarily a learning tool for use in school/university in any case so that will have to become part of the experience! I was hoping to avoid some complexity for casual users (I configure the Pi as a hotspot and redirect all requests to a web interface) but there we go.

[jamesh]

AFAIK, OpenJDK is not subject to the commercial licencing of Oracle Java. i.e. its free to use.

[matt789]

Thanks for this. I'll bear that in mind if the project ends up requiring Java.