License Compliance in Embedded Linux with the Yocto Project
Published:
Tags: conference-talk, yocto
I gave a talk on License Compliance in Embedded Linux at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019 in Lyon, France. This talk began with a build-system agnostic section on best practices and pitfalls to avoid, then moved onto discussing Yocto Project specific licensing metadata and tools.
Slides from this talk are available in PDF format.
Abstract
If you distribute a product which runs an Embedded, Linux-based software stack then you have obligations to fulfil under the GPL and other open source licenses. Thankfully, the Yocto Project provides tooling to help you achieve this.
Paul will present the current state of the license compliance tools in the Yocto Project and show how they are used. Paul will also discuss best practices, pitfalls to avoid, methods of integration with other license compliance software such as Fossology and where to get further information on these subjects. For those already familiar with these tools, this presentation will point out recent improvements and suggest areas for future development. A comparison with tools provided by other Embedded Linux build systems will also be given so that our projects can learn from each other. Focus will be given to how small teams can use these tools effectively, however the content will also be relevant to larger organisations. No legal advice will be given.