Using freeRTOS in commercial products? Licensing?

[abhishekkumar1902]

My company is planning to use freeRTOS for one of their commercial product. I just wanted to know if we can directly take the freeRTOS source and use it, will it be a problem in commercial products (from which the company will make money). Or this is not correct and we should opt for something else? Basically, I wanted to know about licensing and all if you have any experiences!

[stmdude]

If you're only using FreeRTOS (and not one of the extensions, like FreeRTOS+FAT or FreeRTOS+TCP), you should be fine.

There's a nice matrix of what you're allowed to do with FreeRTOS here: http://www.freertos.org/a00114.html

The TL;DR of that is: Yes, you can use it in a commercial product, with no strings attached, except one. If you do changes to FreeRTOS itself, you need to open-source those. If you don't change the FreeRTOS kernel, you don't need to do anything.

[abhishekkumar1902]

Do we have any better alternatives to freeRTOS which are free and open source only?

[newbrain]

IANAL and TINLA, that goes without saying, though I'm every now and then the go-to guy for first level screening of FOSS licenses.

The modified GPL V2 of FreeRTOS seems to be quite benign, sort of a LGPLv2 with static linking.
Other form of linking are not mentioned in the GPL exception, but usually not very relevant for the embedded case.

The most severe binding is that if one modifies the FreeRTOS files themselves, those changes fall under the regular GPLv2: their source needs to be made available to your customers for a period of three years (no need to have it public, but the customer could freely decide to make it so!).

Do we have any better alternatives to freeRTOS which are free and open source only?

What do you mean by free and open source only?
All usable SW comes with one or more licenses, unless it is in the public domain.
(if a piece of SW has no license, it cannot be -lawfully- used by anyone but the copyright holder)

Open Source SW Licenses can be very permissive or very restrictive, but are a fact of life.

A product to check is ChibiOS, its double licensing (GPLv3 and Free Commercial) could fit your needs.

[abhishekkumar1902]

I understand all FOSS software falls under some or the other license, I was just asking that freeRTOS looks like feature loaded though, but is there even better FOSS RTOS than freeRTOS?

[Jeroen3]

Do we have any better alternatives to freeRTOS which are free and open source only?

Yes, ChibiOS.

[newbrain]

Do we have any better alternatives to freeRTOS which are free and open source only?

Yes, ChibiOS.

Yup, maybe it went unnoticed in my post...

[donotdespisethesnake]

I understand all FOSS software falls under some or the other license, I was just asking that freeRTOS looks like feature loaded though, but is there even better FOSS RTOS than freeRTOS?

That question is frequently asked, but impossible to answer. It depends on your requirements. What type of micro have you got, what is it required to do? Embedded systems cover everything from an 8 bit MCU flashing an LED to a 3GHz rack mount running a radar controller.

The question to ask of FOSS is not "is it free to use in a commercial product", because all FOSS allows that. The question is "might I have to give source or object code to customers", which can be really important consideration, and different products might have different answers. Generally, if there is some chance that the code might need to be given to a customer, then companies don't like to risk that.. Other license restrictions such as carrying copyright notices into documentation or allowing company details to be used for marketing purposes may also be impractical or undesirable.

So the actual question is "I am looking for a FOSS project with permissive license, without any strings attached (i.e non-copyleft, non-share-alike, no additional 'small print')". That actually narrows things quite a lot.

You might consider mbed https://os.mbed.com/, but note that not all parts of mbed ecosystem are Open, and it takes a little extra work to compile projects locally.

Edit : a sample of some of thousands of RTOS available at wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operating_systems includes most of the more popular RTOS.

[andyturk]

http://arm-software.github.io/CMSIS_5/RTOS2/html/index.html