ARCTIC's Fan Controller Driver For Linux Being Dual-Licensed With BSD-2-Clause

Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it's left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the ARCTIC Fan Controller is the best desktop fan controller for Linux and less than $10 USD. That open-source driver is now being dual-licensed to help with in bringing it to more operating systems.

ARCTIC has now dual licensed their "arctic_fan_controller" driver to be GPLv2+ and BSD-2-Clause. Up to now it was GPLv2+ while adding BSD-2-Clause.

This driver being dual licensed with the BSD-2-Clause will help for those that may want to bring this fan controller driver to the BSDs or other platforms where preferring something other than the GNU GPL. It's a small but important change for potential customers wanting to manage their desktop PC's fan speeds beyond the Linux or Windows.

The dual licensing has made it into the hwmon-next Git branch and thus will happen with the Linux 7.4 kernel cycle later this year.

This fan controller can continue to be found from the likes of Amazon (affiliate link) for $8.99 USD making it a very nice and affordable option with official Linux support.