[Qemu-devel] Help needed - LGPL Violation and Legal Threats

[Qemu-devel] Help needed - LGPL Violation and Legal Threats

[Tom Cain]

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G'day QEMU wizards,
I've recently been made aware of an organization that seems to be pretty actively sending out nastygrams to people who redistribute their software which is a QEMU derivative.
It was my understanding that current versions of QEMU full system emulation are GPL, and older versions (0.8.1) were LGPL.
The executables that this company distributes are not distributed with the source, and the company has refused to release the source code upon request, and has threatened legal action to all of those who host these files on their websites.
My binary analysis shows that this is QEMU-0.8.1, can anyone confirm?
http://bigguyspinball.com/nucoresupport.shtml

If so, it appears that this website is committing copyright infringement by violating the terms of the LGPL.

Any insight would be appreciated! I've communicated with the FSF and the Software Freedom Conservancy, and they agree that hypothetically it is a violation. I just need someone to confirm that the contents of that linux binary are QEMU. From the looks of it, if this company is filing lawsuits, it puts a MAJOR damper on the open source community, so any help is appreciated.
Thank you all!
Tom


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Re: [Qemu-devel] Help needed - LGPL Violation and Legal Threats

[Stefan Weil]

Am 02.11.2014 um 03:28 schrieb Tom Cain:
> G'day QEMU wizards,
> 
> I've recently been made aware of an organization that seems to be pretty
> actively sending out nastygrams to people who redistribute their
> software which is a QEMU derivative.
> 
> It was my understanding that current versions of QEMU full system
> emulation are GPL, and older versions (0.8.1) were LGPL.
> 
> The executables that this company distributes are not distributed with
> the source, and the company has refused to release the source code upon
> request, and has threatened legal action to all of those who host these
> files on their websites.
> 
> My binary analysis shows that this is QEMU-0.8.1, can anyone confirm?
> 
> http://bigguyspinball.com/nucoresupport.shtml
> 
> If so, it appears that this website is committing copyright infringement
> by violating the terms of the LGPL.
> 
> Any insight would be appreciated! I've communicated with the FSF and the
> Software Freedom Conservancy, and they agree that hypothetically it is a
> violation. I just need someone to confirm that the contents of that
> linux binary are QEMU. From the looks of it, if this company is filing
> lawsuits, it puts a MAJOR damper on the open source community, so any
> help is appreciated.
> 
> Thank you all!
> 
> Tom


Hello Tom,

nucore is a Linux executable. It includes many QEMU related strings and
other indicators for QEMU code:

$ strings nucore | grep -i qemu | wc
     44     494    3740

Among those strings, two show the version 0.8.1:

$ strings nucore | fgrep 0.8.1
QEMU 0.8.1
QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.8.1

The license information for QEMU 0.8.1 is here:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/v0.8.1/LICENSE

That license text clearly states that LGPL applies to the system emulation.

Cheers
Stefan