Simrad/Navico NSE12 & NSE8 Linux open source

[muttnik]

Sorry for reviving an old thread but I've been poking about in both the Simrad and Raymarine stuff recently and thought I'd add to this.

IANAL and I confess the GPL and its various versions confuses the heck out of me, but my basic understanding is that there's no obligation to provide source to your own work just because you used gcc to compile it. You do however need to provide a copy of the GPL and provide a copy of the source of any component of your product which are covered by the GPL.

Both the new Raymarine and Navico MFD software is linux based (Ray 3.2/3.4, Navico 2.6). Both look like they're custom built and both are based around busybox which, given that I once made a minor code contribution, makes me a Raymarine and Navico developer: woohoo! The Raymarine software is fatter at nearly a gig download and includes a bunch of stuff with other open source licences (BSD, MIT) as well as GPL. My understanding which could be wrong is that manufacturers should provide a copy of the licence for all open source components whose licensing demands it, licence and sources for the GPL stuff but they have no obligations with regard to their own intellectual property.

The Simrad NSS distribution has the licence files bundled in with the software update. This includes a commercial QT licence. All quite neatly done per-package. No mention of open source licences in the manual as far as I can see.

The Raymarine stuff doesn't include licences (that I found, other than for some TI firmware). There's mention of the GPL in the MFD manual saying the licence can be found at "www.raymarine.com". Put "GPL" or "GNU" into their search facility though and nothing turns up. No mention of the non-GPL licenses (for X, dropbear etc.)

I posted a question on the Raymarine tech support site about licences and sources. Credit to them , they are providing sources as obliged here and addressing the oversight in not updating the archive: GPL? - Raymarine Technical Forum
I'm guessing the non-GPL licenses are in that humungous download.
IMHO the people running the US Raymarine forum are both efficient and honest.
Not impressed with their web designers and technical writers in making the stuff so hard to find.

Still waiting for Navico to get back to me about sources. It's been 3 days now but it's entirely possible that they're still checking their facts to avoid annoying a freetard politico: I'll report back when they get back to me...

[muttnik]

Just to round this off...took a couple of attempts with the contact form and a couple of weeks' wait second time around but Navico did get back to me in the end to say that they will provide source code for the open source components of their products via a private url to individual owners who request it and have done so once before. This seems like a step in the right direction although doesn't imho really constitute the "written offer" to provide source which the GPL requires accompany binary distributions of the software it covers.