Software Licensing¶

In general, each of the Osmocom projects contains a COPYING file in the soure code, containing the detailed software license of the respective project. Please make sure to understand the license terms before using the software!

AGPLv3+: Most Osmocom Cellular infrastructure software, such as OpenBSC¶

The following notes apply to software described on this wiki, developed as part of the Osmocom project. Specifically, it applies to OpenBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoSGSN, OsmoBTS, gb_proxy, ipaccess-config, bsc_nat, osmo-bsc_mgcp, ...

For reasons of simplicity, we always call it OpenBSC here.

OpenBSC is copyrighted software like any other computer program. In order to use OpenBSC, you need a license from the copyright holders.

If you do not arrange for a different license with the copyright holders, the software ships with a default license: The AGPLv3 (GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3).

General idea behind the AGPLv3 Licensing¶

The general idea behind our licensing model is as follows: You receive the full source code of the OpenBSC software and can use it like you see fit, but we require you to release the source code of any modifications or derivative work you create.

With AGPL, it does not matter whether you ever distribute the OpenBSC software. As soon as you provide a GSM network using OpenBSC, all users are entitled to receive a copy of the license text and the complete corresponding source code of the very version you are using to run the GSM network with.

GPLv2+: libosmocore, OsmoPCU¶

libosmocore (and its siblings libosmogsm, libosmovty, libosmoctrl, etc.) as well as OsmoPCU are licensed under "GNU GPL Version 2, or any later version". This means at the time of this writing, you can license them under either GPLv2 or GPLv3.

As both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are strong copyleft licenses, it means that creating a derivative work of the library and an executable program will require that executable program to be under the same GPL version.

If you use the libraries together with the Osmocom executable programs (see above), then libosmocore will be licensed under GPLv3, which is compatible with the AGPLv3 of the executable programs.

Questions¶

If you have any questions regarding the licenses used in the Osmocom project, please contact the project authors before you create any kind of product or a derivative work.