Re: [Qemu-devel] Add support for new image type

[Kai Meyer <kai.meyer@storagecraft.com>]

On 05/16/2012 12:21 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 05/16/2012 12:48 PM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> Il 16/05/2012 19:06, Kai Meyer ha scritto:
>>> 1) It's been suggested to me that since we have the rights to 
>>> distribute
>>> our closed source shared library, there is a precedence for being able
>>> to distributed a modified version of qemu that does run-time linking
>>> against our shared library. The absence or presence of our shared
>>> library simply enables or disables support for our file format. We are
>>> happy to make available all changes to the qemu source code, but we are
>>> not in a position to re-license our shared library's source code to a
>>> compatible GPL license. This seems to be in contradiction to Paolo's
>>> statement above, so while I can't resist asking if this is possible, I
>>> don't have any realistic expectation that this is acceptable.
>>
>> That's really getting into grey areas.  IANAL, so I cannot answer this
>> question.
>
> It's not morally grey though.  The GPL is designed to attempt to 
> prohibit this and as a copyright holder in QEMU, I choose[1] to use 
> the GPL specifically to prevent this.
>
> QEMU only exists because people have contributed back their 
> improvements to the project.  Not contributing back means that you are 
> only taking from the community withing returning anything back.  Only 
> your lawyer can tell you whether this is legal or not, but it's 
> certainly unkind.
>
> [1] I == Anthony Liguori, not IBM.  I began my involvement in QEMU 
> long before IBM paid me to be.
>
> Regards,
>
> Anthony Liguori
Even though it makes it clear that I will not be able to have the tight 
integration with QEMU that I would like, I appreciate learning that you 
are a copyright holder, and intended to use the GPL to prevent what I'm 
trying to do. StorageCraft is new to Linux, and I am a fairly young 
software engineer, so our interaction with GPL software is fairly low. 
This has been very insightful and instructive.