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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I haven't checked what Mongoose does, but it's fairly common for embedded OS's to link the application and kernel together. IOW, using the GPL may force you to give the source code to your customers if they ask for it.

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So I'm a little confused on how licensing works in these types of situations. 'GPL may force you to give the source code', which source code? Presumably whatever code lives on the device that uses Mongoose is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. So does this imply you only need to give the code that lives on the device running Mongoose? Or any of your code that interacts with it?

What he's saying is that embedded devices a lot of the time statically link the kernel, libraries, and application all into on bare metal program. A GPL licence on the kernel and libraries would affect the application.

Right. My question is if the code on the bare metal device talks to, say, a cloud server running an API, does the code running the API also fall under the GPL, and therefore need to be released? I assume not, but assumptions can be dangerous.

Oh gotcha. No, your remote code wouldn't need to be released just because your IoT code is GPLed.

In reality nobody knows, it's very a very complex question that has been barely explored in court.

In practice everybody acts under the assumption that the GPL affects all code that is statically linked together, but nothing else. Some people extend the interpretation to dynamic linking, but consensus is that the GPL does not affect code interoperating over other interfaces like web APIs.

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