Newbie Question about GPL V2 Licence

[Gfast2]

Hi ESP-IDF,

Really not ESP-IDF Specific Question. But I wanna deploy "mongoose" as the http server on my application. If I open-sourced my header files which will call the APIs from mongoose library. Do I have to pay them for commercial purpose, too?

BTW: I did investigate time to googling this answer. But there is not some good ones. This one let me understand the most. but still didn't answered my question above.

[WiFive]

You have to either open source your whole app or get commercial license.

[Gfast2]

Hi WiFive,

Thanks for your clear explanation!

I will find out a better solusion for this later.

Cheers

Gfast2

[ESP_Sprite]

You have to either open source your whole app or get commercial license.

Actually... I'm not a lawyer, but the way I read it is like this: The non-commercial variant of Mongoose is GPLv2, which states that all sources need to be made available on request. Now, with your own code, you can do that just fine, but if you want to link in the WIFi/BT libraries, these are closed source, meaning that you cannot distribute the resulting binaries, even in the form of binaries inside the flash of products you sell. If you disable WiFi/BT, you don't have that problem, but that'd probably make Mongoose somewhat useless...

This is actually something that has been low-level bugging us for a while, and we may come up with something (think tiny dynamically-linked 'OS') to fix this in the future.

[Gfast2]

Hi ESP_Sprite:

A tons thanks for your even practical Answers! It brings me to the point that if I didn't plan to pay money on any part of my Software, I have to avoid "Mongoose" at all.

Since Kolban in his book (kolban-ESP32) has mentioned that "Making a REST request using Curl". And I believe most of what I really need is just a RESTful Server. Perhaps I will give Curl a try.

P.s:
To tell the truth, I don't believe there is a "go-to" http server library on ESP-IDF till now. But I believe even deeper, that the main Problem in this point is caused by the problem in between my two ears on my body .

Cheers

Gfast

[WiFive]

Ah yes forgot you can't open source your whole app because of closed source parts of esp-idf.

curl is a client, not server.

Try https://github.com/chmorgan/libesphttpd

[Gfast2]

Hi WiFive,

I will give this a try later:

Try https://github.com/chmorgan/libesphttpd

If you are in Berlin, I believe I will buy you "free beer(s)". If you can bear human like me by your side. I will give that a try too.

Cheers

Su Gao (Gfast2)