[Qemu-devel] Re: FreeOSZoo will stop March 1, 2005

[Robert Wittams <robert@wittams.com>]

Jim C. Brown wrote:
> 3) (This one is a long shot) There may be patent issues that prevent Fabrice
> from releasing his source code.
> 

If he didn't have a patent licence at all, it wouldn't make a difference 
if it were open source or not. It would still infringe on this 
hypothetical patent.

If he had a patent licence which forbade disclosing source code, that 
would be very interesting... and kind of pointless given that patents 
require disclosure to get protection. But stupider things have happened.

Tbh, I'd take Fabrice at face value, and accept that this is a way of 
getting payment for work that he wants to release under a Free licence. 
I'd say it was an implementation of the Street Performer Protocol :
http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html

I just wish the terms of release were less vague than "a gentle company 
decides to subsidy the QEMU project".

We need a money value to be put on this, so a fund raising drive can be 
put together, both from distributions and other vendors (maybe via OSDL) 
  and interested users.

At the moment the requirement is just so up in the air that people don't 
know what to expect next.

Robert