Greenphone is not GPL (was RE: At the risk of being flamed : State of software)

[Attila Csipa]

On Friday 24 August 2007 21:29:15 John Seghers wrote:
> Be careful that you look at exactly what is covered under that GPL
> licensing.  In order to gain access to the phone stack for the Greenphone
> (a must for my purposes) you have to pay them almost $5K for a commercial
> license.

A valid point here, but not really relevant. The phone stack is probably one 
of the things that is very chipset specific - I played around with embedded 
GSM modules from various manufacturers, and while generally they had the same 
AT commands, they required separate handling routines because of different 
extensions, timing specifics or simply implementation bugs. My guess is that 
the stack is a developed on commercial SDK-s for specific GSM chipsets and 
might include non-GPL code which might be a no-go for having these licensed 
as GPL by Trolltech (having roughly the same status as does the GPS daemon 
code in OpenMoko, but I'm guessing here). So in any case, I think that it is 
by far easier to write a GSM phone stack (especially having already written a 
couple :) ) than a complete GUI framework.