The project got this far thanks to the free tools like Arduino IDE, examples, community behind the ESP8266 and bits and pieces all over the internet. I'd like to share this work so that it could be modified, adapted and used by other people as well.

Software licence

The software of this project is based on a number of libraries, it must follow the licensing rules stated by them first. However different parts were licensed with different licences, which is very annoying.

As an engineer legal text is out of my domain and frankly I wouldn't want to mess with it as much as possible, however to make my work available to others this is a necessity for some reason.

The table on the ESP8266 Arduino GitHub page lists all the licences that their work is based on and since the IPM software, in turn, is based on theirs it must comply with them:

• Arduino IDE is used to program the code (GPL)
• Arduino ESP8266 core libraries are used (LGPL)
• Xtensa toolchain compiles the code (GPL)
• Esptool uploads the code to the ESP8266 (GPLv2)
• Espressif SDK is needed to compile the code (Espressif MIT License)
• umm_malloc is probably used somewhere in the code (MIT)

The licences have different requirements, made relatively easy to understand thanks to this page.

The current software has to comply with LGPL because the code borrows a lot from the SDWebServer example and it requires derivative work to adopt the same licence. LGPL also permits to publish under GPL (but not vice versa).

GPL has a "bigger restriction" than LGPL (stronger copyleft) in that all derivative work, be it used as a library or not, must adopt the same licence. I like the fact that all derivative work based on this project needs to published it under the same very permissive licence, so I'm publishing it under the GNU General Public License.

The L/GPL also requires documentation, which I think is just as important as the project itself.

Hardware licence

I don't really care about people selling this project, or derivatives of it, and making a profit. However I very much care about making these works just as available as this project, so that is why I decided to go with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License for the hardware.