Re: [Qemu-devel] a question about licensing

[Anthony Liguori]

Alex Rozenman wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to get a clarification about possibility to incorporate 
> our proprietary code with QEMU in the following ways:

Licensing questions should be directed to lawyers.

I believe both scenarios go against the spirit of how QEMU is licensed 
though.  There is no intention of allowing QEMU as a whole to be used in 
a closed product or for it to be able to load closed plugins.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Way 1.
> =====
> Let's assume that I changed QEMU allowing a possibly to build it as 
> static/dynamic library (I needed to add a configuration option 
> replacing main by qemu_main and changing the main build target). Our 
> customer wants to build an executable from following components:
> 1. Modified QEMU library.
> 2. Our proprietary library (e.g. mylib.a, mylib.h)
> 3. An open source "glue" file(s) containing calls to QEMU library as 
> well as to mylib.a
> I understand that the executable will become GPL and the customer is 
> intended to use it only internally. Is it possible to keep my mylib.a 
> proprietary and closed source ? Is it legal from QEMU point of view ?
>
> Way 2.
> =====
> We will implement a kind of '-M" like option that will load a 
> shareable library of a board (for example -M dynamic:my_board.so), 
> find and call a function in order to initialize the board and then run 
> normal QEMU main loop. The board code will define its own peripherals 
> and connect them to the CPU. It is obvious, that our proprietary code 
> shall not use any GPL peripherals and only call to GLPL functions like 
> "map_physical_memory" and "write_physical_memory" etc.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Alex Rozenman (address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>).