IPFire is free software. That means we cannot ship any software under non-free licenses.

Which licenses are allowed to be used?

All software that is included in IPFire must be under a license that is approved to comply with the Open Source definition.

Packaging

When packaging a new piece of software, it is required to check the license of the code first. The license must be allowed to be used in IPFire. For more information about that, see the section above.

The license of the package has to be set in the makefile like:

name = beep
version = 1.3
release = 1

groups = Applications/System
url = http://www.johnath.com/beep/
license = GPLv2+
summary = Beep the PC speaker any number of ways.

Sub-packages

All licenses must be reflected. If sub-packages do use different licenses, this must be set like this:

package beep-libs
license = LGPLv2+
end

In this example, libraries are licensed under the lesser restrictive LGPL.

Firmware

The license field for any firmware that disallows modification should be set to: "Redistributable, no modification permitted".