Commercial use of BeagleBone

GoogleGroups
1

I know that BeagleBoards are not supposed to be used in commercial
products, and that clones/derivatives should be used instead.

I have also read in the BeagleBone SRM that "We mean it; these design
materials may be totally unsuitable for any purposes.". So its
obviously on our own heads - we can not blame anyone else.

But that does not quite answer the question as to whether there is
the same prohibition on commercial use on the BeagleBone.

David

2

Are we talking the “design” or the board? We will not guarantee continued supply of any version of the BeagleBone. We will change it as we deem necessary to make it better. Therefore if you put the BeagleBone boards in a product, you will find that a particular revision is no longer made and you cannot buy them. If you want to use the design in a product, that is fine. If you want to build the board yourself, that is fine. We are not in the business to crank out thousands of boards for someone to stick in their product., We want to use our production capacity to build boards that go to the community. If we determine that a distributor is selling the BeagleBone for commercial use, they will find their supply of boards will not be there.

In the use of the design, you are totally responsible for the design and its use in your product. We did not design the board for use in your product and therefore have no way to know if it will work in your product. That is totally your responsibility and not ours. We cannot guarantee that it will work in your product.

All the design material is there for you to use as you see fit.

Does this answer your question?

Gerald

3

Are we talking the "design" or the board? We will not guarantee continued
supply of any version of the BeagleBone. We will change it as we deem
necessary to make it better. Therefore if you put the BeagleBone boards in
a product, you will find that a particular revision is no longer made and
you cannot buy them. If you want to use the design in a product, that is
fine. If you want to build the board yourself, that is fine. We are not in
the business to crank out thousands of boards for someone to stick in their
product., We want to use our production capacity to build boards that go to
the community. If we determine that a distributor is selling the BeagleBone
for commercial use, they will find their supply of boards will not be
there.

In the use of the design, you are totally responsible for the design and
its use in your product. We did not design the board for use in your
product and therefore have no way to know if it will work in your product.
That is totally your responsibility and not ours. We cannot guarantee that
it will work in your product.

All the design material is there for you to use as you see fit.

Does this answer your question?

Yes, I thought that probably the same rules applied but I had not seen
it written down anywhere and I wanted to be sure.

David

4

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Gerald

5

Ninja blocks is what we call a “value add”. If you build a product using say the BeagleBone and you tell the world it is a BeagleBone and promote it as such, then we would consider you for a value add arrangement.

We also have an arrangement where you can buy a board without the logo, making it your product, from the same company that builds the BeagleBoards. Based on the open source license, you can do whatever you want with it, but it is your design and you are totally responsible for it working in you application. It is also not covered under the BeagleBoard.org RMA support or warranty.

Gerald

6

Thanks for the reply. It cleared everything.

Jorge.

7

Hi all,

I wanted to ask two question regarding commercial usage.

  1. About the arrangement to buy a beagle board black without logo mentioned by Gerald. Who handles this arrangement?, CircuitCo does not answer mails and I had not success to contact them.

  2. Now Beagle board black will come with debian installed. Has It some consequence to the commercial use? I mean, Debian is GNU licensed, can a product be sell containing Debian and proprietary software running over it?

8

You can build it yourself. The white label program at CCO has been suspended until they get their production capacity increased.

As to the second question, I defer the SW folks.

Gerald

9

2. Now Beagle board black will come with debian installed. Has It some
consequence to the commercial use? I mean, Debian is GNU licensed, can a
product be sell containing Debian and proprietary software running over it?

If you are purely moving your "application" from an Angstrom install
to a Debian install:

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-redistrib.en.html

However, if your 'patching' anything in the system, the license of
that item obviously applies.

Regards,

10

Thanks for your answers.

Regarding software, I am still lost. I read follow this interesting presentation:
http://coscup.org/2010/slides/14_1_1630_gpl_enforcement.pdf

and as far as I understand, I would not be allowed to sell a product based on the beagle bone black (without logo) with the Debian installed by CircuitCo given that I don’t want to open my software that actually is running over a JVM with a licensed javaSE embedded (because I guess I can not either give commercial use to the open-jdk!).

11

You are definitely lost. I fail to see how the change from Angstrom to
Debian affects you at all.

Debian like Angstrom is a mixture of software packages under numerous
software licenses.

Regards,

12

BTW: Take a look at this recent example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

Valve took "Debian 7 (Wheezy)", backported libraries from
(jessie/testing) and added there closed source "Valve Content
Platform" to make SteamOS:

Anything they changed from the base Wheezy install, is avaiable in
their repo here:

http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/pool/

Regards,

13

I am not a lawyer, but I think you are misunderstanding what the license pertains to. Most people are writing their own application that runs on the BeagleBone. In your case, it may be written in Java and run on a JVM that has a GPL license, but unless you are modifying the JVM code itself, I don’t see how the license would apply to your own code. Likewise with the Linux OS and its licenses. If you modify the OS or the JVM, you have to publish that code. Your application code is your own business, in the same way that people who write Windows applications don’t need to obtain licenses from Microsoft.

14

Ugh. Do you have any more information on that? Circuitco is totally unresponsive about the status of our various orders.

- Mike

15

This is why I do not recommend using it in products. I will have them contact you. Our boards for our distributors have #1 priority. Until CCO gets the additional capacity online, all boards go there.

I will have them contact you.

Gerald

16

Michael,

Did you get a response from CCO?

Gerald

17

Yes. Thank you!

- Mike

18

Let me know if you need anything else!

Gerald

19

Thanks Greg for the answer.

I understand that for my application there are no problems with the licenses, actually I don’t modify the jvm or linux kernel or debian.
The problem I see is: If I deliver jvm in my product in the beagle bone I have to pay a royalty to oracle (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/resources/se-embeddocs/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=null#faq11),
do I have to handle some legal issues when delivering a GPL licensed software (“embedded-hidden”) inside my product?

I also wanted to ask to RobertCNelson, does your BBB debian use non-free packages?

I try this command in a row BBB-debian to find it out:

`dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Package}\t${Section}\n' |grep -e non-free -e contrib`
and I get no feedback. Is it correct?
20

Thanks Greg for the answer.

I understand that for my application there are no problems with the
licenses, actually I don't modify the jvm or linux kernel or debian.
The problem I see is: If I deliver jvm in my product in the beagle bone I
have to pay a royalty to oracle
(Oracle Java SE Embedded Overview),

Yet another reason to not use software from the skum of the earth
(oracle/java)...

do I have to handle some legal issues when delivering a GPL licensed
software ("embedded-hidden") inside my product?

Did you "modify" any GPL software on the system?

We did at beagleboard.org, all those *.deb's we changed also have
source available on debian.beagleboard.org (apt-get source xyz) will
retrieve files.

I also wanted to ask to RobertCNelson, does your BBB debian use non-free
packages?

I try this command in a row BBB-debian to find it out:
dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Package}\t${Section}\n' |grep -e non-free -e
contrib
and I get no feedback. Is it correct?

Yes it includes the "non-free" repo enabled by default. Which
therefore means "non-free" firmware is installed. I'm sorry, but I'd
rather have our userbase be able to use their wifi adapters.

(atmel-firmware firmware-ralink firmware-realtek libertas-firmware
zd1211-firmware)

BTW:

If this switch from "Angstrom" to "Debian" is too much for you. You
can always contract with someone to give you Angstrom. (it won't be
me)

Regards,