License Overview

ArduCopter (aka APM:Copter), ArduPlane (aka APM:Plane), ArduRover (aka APM:Rover) and the Mission Planner are free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation [ http://www.fsf.org/ ].

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

For more specific details see http://www.gnu.org/licenses, the Quick Guide to GPLv3. [ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html ] and the copying.txt [ https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/blob/master/COPYING.txt ] in the codebase.

The GNU operating system which is under the same license has an informative FAQ here [ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html ].

Note to developers

We very much appreciate you using our code to do fun and interesting things with. We hope that while doing this you may find and fix bugs or make enhancements that could be useful for the greater community and will makes the developers aware of them by emailing drones-discuss@googlegroups.com and/or contribute them back using a pull request [ http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/submitting-patches-back-to-master/ ] so they can be considered to be added to the original code base.

Note to businesses or individuals including this software in products

We also greatly appreciate those companies and individuals who incorporate this software into their products for sale. A significant number have already done this. There are some things that the license requires however that we need to point out:

Inform your customers that the software is open source and provide the actual source code in the product or provide a link to where the source code can be found.
As with the contributions of individual developers, we would like it if you could keep us informed of the products that incorporate the software by emailing drones-discuss@googlegroups.com. Also for those changes that could be useful to the wider community we would appreciate it if you could contribute them back using a pull request [ http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/submitting-patches-back-to-master/ ] for consideration to be added to the original code base.

To both individual developers and companies we also ask that when making derivative works, the original credits listing all the individuals that contributed to getting the software to it’s current form are left in place.

Questions about this page? Comments? Suggestions? Post to APM Forum [ http://ardupilot.com/forum/ ] ! Use the platform specific to your query, and make sure to include the name of the page you are referring to.