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Comment by jpfr | Hacker News Reader

As the project is GPL’ed I guess they sell a commercial version. GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software. But it can be good marketing to sell the commercial version.

Edit: I meant commercial license

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You don't need a commercial version, many projects get away with selling just a commercial license to the same version. As long as they have the rights to relicense this works fine.

In my company we used their stuff often. They have an optional commercial license for basically all their products. The price was very reasonable as well.

I think they might sell a commercial version as well. It makes sense with the GPL. But I can't really recall that well.

“GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software”

Why is that?

He probably meant viral or tried to make a deadly twist on virality

Many bare metal or RTOS systems consist of a handful of statically linked programs (one or two bootloaders and the main application), many companies would rather find a non-GPL library rather than open up the rest of the system's code. Sometimes a system contains proprietary code that may not be open sourced as well.

In the embedded world you don't really sell software you sell devices with firmware. Unless the library OS is AGPL, it doesn't matter too much.

Yes it matters a lot?

It matters because:

1) you may not have the right to open the rest of the code on the system 2) although you make money when you sell devices, it also makes cloning trivial

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