Question
I'm glad to review your course. My question deals with your GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. Speaking honestly, if I had known your course was licensed, I would not have taken it. There are many other free courses offered over the Internet that is not shackled with a license agreement; but your course meets all of my needs (particularly, your OS runs on a real computer instead of a VM). After taking your course, I'm going to code my own OS in risc-v, write my own assembler, and translate my own compiler into my assembly intermediate language. My software will be proprietary. My question is: Should your license agreement be a concern? If not, my next question is: now that I paid for your course, how and when do I begin to code?
Answered by Daniel McCarthy
Instructor
Hi Albert,
I am a some-what confused about what you mean when you say how and when do you begin to code?
The coding begins from the moment we write a hello world bootloader, by the end of the course you will have a fully functioning multi-threaded kernel.
As for your licensing concerns, licenses are indeed very important to prevent abuses, when you purchased my course you are purchasing a license to watch the video content the source code was always free under GPL license. Of course the video content is very handy because it actually teaches you kernel development, we end up with the same result upon completing the course.
If you can tell me a little more why you believe my license to be a concern I can answer you. The information I teach in my course are ideas and concepts so are not under my intellectual property (the video content is however and the Dragon Zap license allows only you to watch the course that you purchased and not redistribute it), the source code repository on Github is however my code and work and therefore under the GPL license and all code used from the repository should be under the GPL license.
The GPL license allows you freedoms and keeps software free, you can still sell GPL software but you must follow the licence terms provided.
If you want to reach out to me for a more formal communication please email daniel@dragonzap.com and if you can tell me more about what you plan to do I might be able to issue you an additional license for your needs.
Thanks !
