radare

radare2 is licensed under LGPLv3.

The LesserGPLv3 have the following features:

Privative software (closed source/comercial) can link to it (dynamically).
Privative/Commercial plugins can be developed for it.
All modifications in the opensource part must be done public.
This way, everyone can benefit from the commercial and opensource worlds.

For a sucessful real case of that LGPL see GStreamer.

If you don't want to have legal issues you'll have to understand how software licenses works.

It is important to note that not all plugins in r2 are under the same license, you'll find some pieces in GPL2, BSD, Apache, etc.

We are trying to shrink and squash all the GPL code as much as possible because of the following reasons.

GPL is a viral license.
You can only statically link GPL programs against them.
You can't dynamically link privative apps with GPL libraries.

In case of doing a privative software that uses r2 as backend and you dont want to care about special builds or detailed license problems, I would recommend to use r2 via r2pipe and distribute r2 as a separate package for your privative app. This way the GPL viral will not be infect your software because there's no binary link between them, only a textual protocol via a pipe or socket.

The current parts that are under GPL and will be replaced or removed soon (old code is moved to the radare2-extras repository).

Some exotic disassemblers
GRUB (libr/fs) - partitions and filesystems
GNU binutils disassemblers (almost replaced by Capstone)
C++ demangler (from binutils)

Grepping for licenses in r_asm plugins

$ rasm2 -L | grep GPL | grep -v LGPL
_dA_  16 32      arc         GPL3    Argonaut RISC Core
adA_  16 32 64   arm.gnu     GPL3    Acorn RISC Machine
_dA_  16 32      avr         GPL     AVR Atmel
_dAe  32         cris        GPL3    Axis Comm. 32-bit
adAe  32 64      mips.gnu    GPL3    MIPS CPU
_dAe  32         nios2       GPL3    NIOS II
_dA_  32 64      ppc.gnu     GPL3    PowerPC
_dA_  32         sh          GPL3    SuperH-4 CPU
_dA_  32 64      sparc.gnu   GPL3    Scalable Proc Arch
ad__  32         x86.olly    GPL2    OllyDBG X86 Disasm

If you want to ship r2 in your privative product remember to remove all the GPL plugins from your build using a custom plugins.cfg or passing it to ./configure-plugins.

If you have any other question about licenses, I would recommend you to contact the Free Software Foundation or just drop me an email.

--pancake

License