Hi, first of all, in case you are a newcomer to this mailing list, take into account that this is just a discussion list and it does not represent Debian's official position, nor it represents qualified legal advice. So whatever you gather from this discussion, which I hope to be useful, you'll probably want to submit to qualified lawyers if you want to act on it. Il 04/04/19 07:59, Wade Pinkston ha scritto: > So my question is this- Is there a way to release a free software > package for Debian, but maintain IP rights to it?, or at least make the > code unavailable. If so , what is the best way to do this? Congratulations and thanks for wanting to support Debian's and free software users using your hardware. I hope my email can help you in doing this as effectively as possible. I am not sure how do "IP rights" work in this context, but definitely everything that goes in Debian must be accompanied by its source code (mostly defined as the preferred form to read and modify the program). This applies to drivers, userspace libraries and interactive software, although each of them can be considered as a different software package and therefore be independently considered for inclusion in Debian. It also applies to firmware, if that has to be loaded from the computer. It does not apply to the electronics itself, which might be what you call IP if I am not mistaken, because that would not be distributed with Debian anyway (personally I would advocate for opening the hardware itself, but I understand your concerns and as I said that's not required for having an open driver anyway). Distributing your software as free/open source of course exposes its interface with the hardware (though you are not required to properly document such interface, a free software implementing it effectively is a form of documentation), which I am not sure if you want to protect or not. Consequently, it also eases the possibility that third parties release alternative implementations or modifications of your implementation, which I would tend to consider a positive thing for you, because it enables more users to easily work with your hardware. But again it is up to you to make your judgements on that. Keep also in mind that Debian also has a non-free archive, where software that does not meet Debian's criteria for be considered free can be hosted, as long as Debian has at least the legal right to redistribute it. This is not considered part of the official Debian distribution, and it is consider a last resort for software that is not free but that it is useful to so many users that it is nice to have it easily installable anyway. Your software seems to be directed to a rather small niche, so I am not sure it would be appropriate to include it in non-free. I hope this helps. Regards, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani@gmail.com> Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles
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