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

[Grzegorz Kulewski]

Hi,

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
> Following Fabrice decision to transform QEMU into a proprietary closed
> solution

No, Fabrice did not transform QEMU into anything. He simply added another 
optional module than can make QEMU faster and more bug-free. You can still 
use QEMU without the accelerator and be perfectly happy with it. Also any 
further development in area of IO, devices and so on will make both 
versions better. KQEMU is only very small accelerator.

Think about PHP and different accelerators. PHP itself is free product 
(PHP licence, IIRC). But there are many (often commercial but not all) 
accelerators for it (one even made by Zend - autor of PHP). But this 
does not make PHP less free. There are milions of people using PHP without 
any accelerator, there are some using it with commercial accelerator and 
there are few using it with one of free accelerators. Exactly the same 
goes for QEMU.

QEMU is even better because no non-free part is linked with any code in 
QEMU (userspace). This way no QEMU based free products (for example GUIs 
or anything other) are affected by this addition and no licence is broken. 
GPL, of course, allows calling non-free program or using GPLed program on 
OS with non-free module.

Strictly speaking there are more problems at the kernel level. This is 
because Linus and other gave their permission to load non-free modules to 
the kernel but only as a special exception and mainly because some kernel 
modules were written for some other OSes and were ported to Linux and 
their code cannot be opened. This is not the case for KQEMU because it was 
written especially for Linux but I think this is still more-or-less ok. 
Nobody will hopefully complain.

[ Fabrice, please make sure that all files linked with QEMU are free 
because GPL demands that. I did not investigated this but if the header 
for the module is used in userspace please make it free (BSD?) too. 
Thanks. ]

Of course it will be better if KQEMU will go opensource but I hope it will 
happen fast.


> without any kind of future, I don't find any reason to loose my
> company time and money fostering FreeOSZoo.

Of course its your decision and you have perfect right to make it. But 
please think once more about it. I think that your project is very 
valuable for the community.


> I will hand over the project to any interested person, for exampe Raphaël if
> he is interested by FreeOsZoo.

How fast must be the connection for it? How large is it? How much GB/month 
does it generate currently?


Thanks,

Grzegorz Kulewski