The eCosPro Non-Commercial Public License applies to elements of eCosCentric's intellectual property within a distribution. Depending on the particular release this may cover various files within the HAL, device drivers, documentation and other components. All these files are clearly marked with a reference to the eCosPro Non-Commercial Public Licence in their headers. Key requirements of the license are:

For further clarification of non-commercial use, refer to the Definitions section of the license and its Example Usage appendix.

When distributing code, or derivatives such as object or binary code, under this license, including any hardware or device containing the code or its derivatives, you MUST:

The eCosPro License removes all of the requirements of the eCosPro Non-Commercial Public License, permitting distribution of binary and object code deriatives without restriction and allowing commercial use of the software. A commercial eCosPro Distribution also includes files within the HAL, device drivers, and other components which are clearly marked with a reference to the eCosPro License in their headers. While binary and object code derivatives of these files may be freely copied, these source files themselves must not be redistributed.

The full eCosPro License is available online at https://www.ecoscentric.com/licensing/ecospro-license.shtml.

When shipping a product with eCos or eCosPro, developers and OEMs are encouraged to read the eCosPro Software Licenses Compliance Guide which provides a set of guidelines to follow when releasing products that incorporate software from an eCosPro release. It does not claim to be authoritative, it is still your responsibility to read, understand and comply with the various licenses that apply to different portions of the runtime source code.

On May 2002, eCos was released under a modified version of the well known GNU General Public License (GPL), making it an official GPL- compatible Free Software License. An exception clause has been added to the eCos license which limits the circumstances in which the license applies to other code when used in conjunction with eCos. The exception clause is as follows:

As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros
or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it
with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not
by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public
License. However the source code for this file must still be made
available in accordance with section (3) of the GNU General Public
License.

This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work based on
this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.

The goal of this license is to serve the eCos user community as a whole. It allows all free eCos users to develop products without paying anybody anything, no matter how many developers are working on the product or how many units will be shipped. The license also guarantees that the eCos source code will always be freely available. This applies not only to the core eCos code itself but also to any changes that anybody makes to the core. In particular, it should prevent any company or individual contributing code to the system and then later claiming that all eCos users are now guilty of copyright or patent infringements and have to pay royalties. It should also prevent any company from making some small improvements, calling the result a completely new system, and releasing this under a new and less generous license.

The license does not require developers to release the source code of any applications that includes eCos. However, if you make any changes to code covered by the eCos license, or writes new files derived in any way from eCos code, then the license stipulates that these changes must be made available in source code form to all recipients of binaries based on the modified code, either by including the sources along with the binaries they deliver (or with any device containing such binaries) or with a written offer to supply the source code to the general public for three years. eCosPro Non-Commercial Public licensed code has similar requirements.

eCosPro licensed code is naturally excluded from this requirement.

It is perhaps most practical for eCos developers to make the source code available online and inform those who are receiving binaries containing eCos code, and probably also the eCos maintainers, about the location of the code. See the full text of the GPL for the most authoritative definition of the obligations.

Although it is not strictly necessary to contribute the modified code back to the eCos open source project, the eCos maintainers are always pleased to receive code contributions and are responsible for deciding whether such contributions should be applied to the public repository. In addition, a copyright assignment is required for any significant changes to the core eCos packages.

The result is a royalty-free system with minimal obligations on the part of eCos application developers. This has resulted in the rapid uptake of eCos. At the same time, eCos and eCosPro are fully open source with all the benefits that implies in terms of quality and innovation providing a winning combination.

Prior to May 2002, eCos was released under the Red Hat eCos Public License (RHEPL). The RHEPL required any modifications to eCos code to be made available under preferential terms to Red Hat and was therefore incompatible with code licensed under the GPL. The use of eCos source code which was licensed under the RHEPL is not affected by the switch to the modified GPL for later revisions.

Most of the HTML and online eCosPro documentation is published under one of three licenses:

The PDF version of the documentation is a collection of these works and is therefore also provided under both of these licenses. The original SGML from which items (partitions, chapters, sections, etc) licensed under the Open Publication License may be downloaded from http://ecos.sourceware.org/ or is provided as part of your installation of eCosPro. The full text of the Open Publication License may be found at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/. Modification, reproduction or distribution of any documentation published under the eCosPro License in any form is strictly prohibited, while documentation generated from source or derivatives licensed under the eCosPro Non-Commercial Public License may only be published for non-commercial purposes and carries with it requirements to make the sources or derivatives available to its recipients.

HTML and online versions of the documentation each contain a link at the bottom of each page that specifies the license under which it was provided.