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
