On Friday 22 June 2007 00:34, Balazs Attila-Mihaly (Cd-MaN) wrote: > I must prefix this with the fact that IANAL, but as I understand it, you > must release the source code only if you distribute that modified system > (with GPL v2). That is, if you use this system internally in you company, > you don't have to provide your modifications. But if you, for example, > provide your clients with the modified version, you have the obligation to > provide them (your clients, not the Qemu community in general) also with > the complete source code, after which they have the liberty to redistribute > the source code under the GPL.
Correct. > One solution would be (again, IANAL, so please check with a real lawyer :D), The solution would be to comply with the GPL and release the code. :) > is to create an interface to the code you wish to include and put the > proprietary code in a dynamically linked library which exposes this > interface. In this case IMHO you have to provide only the code which > implements the interface in Qemu and loads the shared library, and you would > have no obligation regarding the code in the shared library. The GPL is viral. A derivative-work wrapper would be under the full GPL terms and could not link out to a proprietary library either. While there are legal loopholes in the GPL, this is not one of them. (and no, I will not provide any more info on the loopholes I am aware of)
