[Discuss-gnuradio] GNURadio and GPL licensing issues

[Krzysztof Kamieniecki]

I've been wondering if GNURadio (which is licensed under GPL) can be "integrated" with proprietary 
code and distributed, for some value of "integrated".

I think this is something that may have to be clarified for researchers at universities, at least 
those with "intellectual property" offices. This may also be of interest to companies that need a 
relatively disconnected front end for signal processing, and may want to invest their signal 
processing developer resources in an open source project.

Example:

Lets say you write a ATSC receiver, using the GNURadio signal processing blocks. This server program 
transmits an MPEG2 transport stream through a TCP/IP socket and accepts commands through another 
TCP/IP socket.  Then you write a proprietary client program that connects to this ATSC receiver 
server through the TCP/IP ports. The ATSC receiver would definitely have to licensed under GPL. What 
about the client program? Would this depend on what type of API the ATSC server has?

There are some answers on the GNU website, but using GNURadio in this way seems 
to be in a gray zone.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

--
Krzysztof Kamieniecki
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