[mythtvnz] General questions

[David Zanetti]

On Sat, 2009-10-24 at 15:16 +1300, Ross and Jemima Knudsen wrote:

> Is Mythtv suitable for commercial use (ie sold as part of a media 
> centre) or are there copyright or other legal infringements?

Suitable I can't comment on, but I can give you some suggestions of
things to think about.

Firstly, I Am Not A Lawyer, and you should consult one.

Copyright over the code etc remains with MythTVs authors regardless of
what you do. What's different is the license -- GPL in this case --
which allows you to distribute and modify the code under specific terms.

Those terms are, broadly, that you must make available the source of
your work if you provide it in a binary form to someone else. Payment
isn't actually required, that is the terms apply even if you charge
nothing for it.

What this means in practice is that if you were to sell such a box,
based on Linux and MythTV, and various other sources (because, remember,
you need to consider *all* of the software involved and their licenses),
you would need to provide the source used to create it.

Even if you provided such a box with no modifications, you still need to
provide the source. If you do make modifications to MythTV's source,
then you very much MUST provide your modifications in source form as
well. That is, you can't change MythTV and claim your changes are
secret, the GPL won't allow you to do that and you will find yourself in
court.

It gets more complicated when you start getting into whether your work
is bound to GPL work. The safest thing to do is consider everything you
do governed by the GPL. This is particularly true if you distribute it
as a single image or install, that's bound enough by GPL's terms to
consider the GPL for the entire contents.

Be Extremely Careful about source code you have from other sources, you
may be infringing on the rights of others when you mingle it with GPL
code.

Lastly, while the GPL does not actually require you to offer your
modifications upstream (ie, to MythTVs maintainers), it's considered
polite to do so.

Many companies have sold products based on Open Source, the key thing is
to ensure you understand how your usage of it, and your modifications
and bundling of it, is affected by the license.