Re: [PATCH] tcg/LICENSE: Remove no-longer-true statement that TCG is BSD-licensed

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

(+Ard, Alex)

On 10/21/19 17:52, Richard Henderson wrote:
> On 10/21/19 7:58 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> Since 2008 the tcg/LICENSE file has not changed: it claims that
>> everything under tcg/ is BSD-licensed.
>>
>> This is not true and hasn't been true for years: in 2013 we
>> accepted the tcg/aarch64 target code under a GPLv2-or-later
>> license statement. We don't really consider the tcg
>> subdirectory to be a distinct part of QEMU anyway.
>>
>> Remove the LICENSE file, since claiming false information
>> about the license of the code is confusing, and update
>> the main project LICENSE file also to be clearer about
>> the license used by TCG.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
>> ---
>> This patch takes the simple approach of just documenting
>> the de-facto current reality; does anybody want to argue
>> for something else? Other possibilities I guess would be
>> specifically documenting tcg/aarch64 as an accidental
>> exception to the general licensing rule for tcg/, or even
>> trying to get it relicensed.
>>
>> Does having tcg/ be BSD-licensed gain the project anything?
>> From my point of view I don't really see it as a cleanly
>> separable module of code -- it's quite tightly integrated
>> with the rest of QEMU, including code in accel/tcg which
>> is variously GPL or LGPL.
> 
> I think this is the best solution.  I've never been convinced that TCG can
> usefully be extracted and reused for something else.

Side comment:

Ard and Alex extracted TCG to run x86 PCIe UEFI option ROMs on aarch64
hardware.

https://github.com/ardbiesheuvel/X86EmulatorPkg
https://kvmforum2017.sched.com/event/Bo0S/qemu-in-uefi-alexander-graf-suse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxvAH1Q4Mx0

If I remember correctly, they specifically picked a git commit hash that
was still purely BSD licensed.

FWIW,
<https://github.com/ardbiesheuvel/X86EmulatorPkg/blob/master/LICENSE> is
not any BSD license, so I'm almost surely out of date on that aspect;
just wanted to confirm that TCG has been usefully extracted.

Thanks,
Laszlo

> Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
> 
> 
> r~
>