Betaflight usage

[reef latch]

Hello guys i have a question. If i make educational dron-related project can i use betaflight? or do i need some aprovall?

[shrewd marsh]

Can you elaborate?

[reef latch]

Sure i wanna teach kids how to make drone from scrach can i use betaflight on such lessons?

[shrewd marsh]

Unless you're using the name Betaflight in a commercial product of your own I think you can do practically anything

[reef latch]

Great ty for answer! Better safe than sorry yeach?

[formal tulip]

This. Its GPLv3 licensed. So as long as you don't claim to be Betaflight or that this project is officially Betaflight endorsed, etc, you can do whatever you want, except for close sourcing the code.

[mossy heron]

As long as they don't publish any derivative work of BF, they can close source the code however they want.

Interesting thought though, as some companies provide .hex files for their drones b/c they don't have an official target in the build system..
If they've modified the BF code in any way, they should make that code public I think.

[formal tulip]

Well, it goes further than that. dropping a hex, isn't publishing a derivative work, but if you send that out without giving people access to the source it is a problem.

You can have a .hex for BF, as long as you also give access to the source. You could make it so that they have to email you and you'll send the source (fulfills GPLv3), but most just publish their stuff on github.
Most companies that just drop a hex also do that, but they don't advertise it much.