Source Code Legal Question

[Jon Stratis]

What do you plan to do with the source code?

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and offer no legal advice.

As part of FIRST, we get Wind River (A commercial product) licenses, and we're bound by the End User License Agreement, just like any other user. Many EULA's expressly prohibit actions like decompiling or reverse engineering, although I've never inspected Wind River. Further, copyright law fully protects source code. Being a part of FIRST does not give us any special rights when it comes to Wind River.

This is very different from WPIlib. WPIlib is released as source code, under an Open Source license. Its files have the following at the top:

/*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
/* Copyright (c) FIRST 2008-2012. All Rights Reserved.                        */
/* Open Source Software - may be modified and shared by FRC teams. The code   */
/* must be accompanied by the FIRST BSD license file in the root directory of */
/* the project.                                                               */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

It basically says go for it, use it for whatever you want.

So, the two are very, very different when it comes to the rights we have (as a FIRST community) to use or modify them. If we knew what you wanted to use it for, we might be able to point you in a better direction.