Airspy Driver Licensing Change

[DSheirer]

For any open source software authors who may be using airspy code/library in your application, there's an interesting exchange going on in the repo. Youssef changed the licensing terms and that appears to be causing concern with upstream Linux distro maintainers and Ben V. (HydraSDR).

Minor CMake maintenance by LecrisUT · Pull Request #100 · airspy/airspyone_host

Bump the minimum cmake policies Use the standard GNUInstallDirs patterns I would also recommend ditching all of the Find*.cmake modules and cmake_uninstall, but I will wait for upstream to advise ...

github.com

Some recently deleted comments from Benjamin:

As you can see in the master branch (Commits · airspy/airspyone_host), Youssef Touil has made copyright modifications that conflict with the original license terms. These changes impose new restrictions on the AirSpy brand, contrary to the code's original open-source status without such constraints.
I do not agree with these license modifications, which were made without my knowledge or consent. Consequently, I am unable to approve future pull requests.
Thank you for your understanding.

bvernoux left a comment (airspy/airspyone_host#105)
Thank you for raising this concern.

However, I must respectfully disagree with combining these libraries for several important reasons:
Technical and Hardware Differences:

• The libairspyhf library supports the AirSpy HF+ series, which is fundamentally different hardware with a proprietary design that is completely unrelated to the original AirSpy R2/Mini platform.
  These devices have distinct architectures, capabilities, and use cases that warrant separate libraries.

Ownership and Licensing Concerns:
The situation regarding the AirSpy R2 / Mini codebase and any future development is complicated by significant licensing issues:

• I am the creator and designer of the AirSpy R2 / Mini hardware with full ownership rights
• I wrote the complete firmware GitHub - airspy/airspyone_firmware: AirSpy Firmware (over 96% of the codebase) and the majority of the host code GitHub - airspy/airspyone_host: AirSpy's usemode driver and associated tools (over 77% of the codebase) from the ground up.
• As documented in the master branch commit history (Commits · airspy/airspyone_host), unauthorized copyright modifications were made by Youssef Touil that directly contradict the original license terms.
• These modifications now impose brand restrictions on the AirSpy name, whereas this code was originally fully open source without any such constraints.
• These license changes were made without my knowledge or consent as the primary author and hardware creator / owner.

Given these fundamental technical differences and unresolved licensing conflicts, I do not agree to integrate libairspyhf into this repository.
Any such integration would further complicate an already contentious situation regarding code ownership and licensing rights.

 

[maus92]

So how will this kerfuffle affect end users? Does that mean programs like SDR Trunk et al will no longer support Airspy brand devices and similar SDRs?

 

[DSheirer]

This won't affect sdrtrunk -- I recreated all of the airspy interface code in Java.