Commercial hardware project

General
1

Hi all and Mopidy maintainers,

I’m researching the possibilities of designing a dedicated hardware device for commercial sale that would use Mopidy (almost certainly modified) and, ideally, various modules. My understanding of the Apache 2.0 license is that as long as all the derivative software keeps the same license and indicates modifications, there shouldn’t be any problem with this (and I want all the software, and probably the hardware, to be open source anyway). Any “3rd-party” modules used would of course abide by their own licenses (so far it looks like most of them use Apache 2.0 anyway).

I’ve been using Pi MusicBox for only a week now and it’s basically what I’ve always wanted, except for some additional features that I’m working on now. The project would encapsulate all that in a lovely but cost-effective enclosure and set of consistent UIs geared at the average consumer.

Open source communities are important to me, so I want to make sure that nobody would have a problem with a product for commercial sale that utilizes all this excellent work.

Lastly, if anyone is specifically interested in hearing more and contributing to this project, I’d be happy to hear from you :smile:

2

I thought about that too (I am the author of Pi MusicBox), but never came to that in the end… And I don’t have much hardware experience. What are your plans? You can mail me at woutervanwijk@gmail.com if you don’t want to discuss it publicly

3

Using Apachce 2.0 licensed software in commercial projects should be fine. There is already at least one example of this that we know of using a Mopidy derivative. Thing to keep in mind is mostly how you combine mopidy with other libraries / licenses as things can get tricky for the case where the other part isn’t one of the permissive licenses.

As for giving back to the community, last time around we did get some patches flowing back to us. But things got a bit bumpy due to deadlines on the other end and them pushing ahead without working with us to see how to shape things so they could be merged back. In summary we are open to changes, things aren’t set in stone, but showing up with a huge PR without having discussed things first might not work out.

4

I what way would you want to differ your product from Gramofon?
https://www.gramofon.com