From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:36201) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1SUjOw-0002yH-GX for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 16 May 2012 14:56:47 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1SUjOu-0000R0-FW for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 16 May 2012 14:56:46 -0400 Received: from webmail.storagecraft.com ([199.101.231.144]:39551 helo=STC-EXCH.stc.local) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1SUjOu-0000QF-7X for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 16 May 2012 14:56:44 -0400 Message-ID: <4FB3F867.7050303@storagecraft.com> Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 12:56:39 -0600 From: Kai Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <4F4E9E31.50903@storagecraft.com> <4F4F8FCD.7010106@redhat.com> <4F4FD1C9.8050006@storagecraft.com> <4F4FD7C7.7030001@mail.berlios.de> <4F4FD9A6.9060308@mail.berlios.de> <4F4FE4AA.20902@codemonkey.ws> <4F4FE6C6.1070302@storagecraft.com> <4F506E92.9080902@redhat.com> <4FB3DE79.9090504@storagecraft.com> <4FB3E86B.7020206@redhat.com> <4FB3F03A.3010509@codemonkey.ws> In-Reply-To: <4FB3F03A.3010509@codemonkey.ws> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Add support for new image type List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Anthony Liguori Cc: Nate Bushman , Paolo Bonzini , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Stefan Weil 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.