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License

A distinctive feature of BeRTOS is its license, because it is a completely free, open source, real time operating system (RTOS) suitable for embedded platforms also for commercial or closed source projects.

You are free:

  • to include BeRTOS within any product, distributed under any license (including commercial licenses and/or closed-source licenses)
  • to modify BeRTOS as you want in any of its part under the following conditions:
Attribution
You must declare in a written statement that you are using BeRTOS in your application and offer to provide the (possibly modified) BeRTOS source code.
Share-alike
If you modify BeRTOS, you may distribute it only under the original license.

You are encouraged to:

  • Contribution. Contribute any modifications to BeRTOS back to us, so that we can integrate and maintain them for you (for free!)

What you can do with BeRTOS

If you are a company or individual doing commercial embedded products, you can:

  • Download and use BeRTOS as you want
  • Sell products based on BeRTOS, without paying nothing nor giving your application source code but you must write that you are using BeRTOS in the documentation. A text like this is sufficient:
"This product uses BeRTOS ( http://www.bertos.org), Copyright 2005-2008 Develer S.r.l."
  • If you modified BeRTOS, offer the modified version of BeRTOS for download from your website. Otherwise, you can send your modifications to us, and when they get integrated within the official BeRTOS release, you can stop offering them for download.

Exception

BeRTOS is copyrighted software, provided under the term of the GNU General Public License version 2 with following exception:

As a special exception, you may use this file as part of a free software
library without restriction.  Specifically, if other files instantiate
templates or use macros or inline functions from this file, or you compile
this file and link it with other files to produce an executable, this
file does not by itself cause the resulting executable to be covered by
the GNU General Public License.  This exception does not however
invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by
the GNU General Public License.

Focus on:

  • Some other detailed information about BeRTOS license are written in our F.A.Q. area of the website.