Practical GPL Compliance — The Flowcharts
A month and a half ago I released a book with Armijn Hemel entitled ‘Practical GPL Compliance.’ It is a guide for startups, small businesses, and engineers tasked with shipping products that contain GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2) code. It is available for free from The Linux Foundation here:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/research/practical-gpl-compliance
The reaction to the book has been exceptional. We exceeded 2,000 physical and digital copies distributed within a few weeks and have received a ton of comments, suggestions and requests.
The big question is how do we make a guide for practical compliance even better?
The answer is that we turn it into tools. We share components from the book that can be adjusted, expanded and remixed by anyone to support their workflow. That process starts today with the release of the flowcharts from the book under CC-0 license and their donation to The OpenChain Project.
Our goal is to help expand the OpenChain Curriculum material and to help ensure that great knowledge about open source compliance spreads outwards and helps support training programs for organizations of all sizes.
Without further ado I give to you the flowcharts from page 63 to 68. Below you will find:
- Flowchart #0: General Approval Flowchart.
With thanks to Royal Philips Electronics - Flowchart #1: How Do I Distribute?
- Flowchart #2: Offline Distribution
- Flowchart #3: Firmware Updates
- Flowchart #4: Over The Air
- Flowchart #5: LGPL Code
Want the source code? Check the end of this document. Enjoy!
And watch my Medium feed. There is more to come…
Footnotes
Want other sharable and editable formats? Get AI, PDF, PNG, PSD and SVG formats of the Flowcharts at:
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/_media/openchain/practical-gpl-compliance-flowcharts.zip
Curious about the font used in the flowcharts? I went with OpenSans. This font is available under the Apache License 2.0 and you can learn more about it here.