Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Sponsorship for QEMU Developers...

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 00:40 -0500, Leonardo E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> I apologize for any confusion.  In fact I think I also used 'GPL' in my 
> note by mistake instead of 'LGPL'.
> 

Yep, noticed that. But I was still wrong. I just can't keep QEMU
licensing straight in my head. Maybe now that I stepped in it good, I'll
remember ;-) QEMU is LGPL or BSD. 

> The bottom line is just that we always prefer to err on the safe side, 
> thus we chose not to include files such as 'vl.h' in our closed source 
> bits.  Plus, it can get a bit dicey when the same tarball actually 
> contains code with 2 or 3 (most files have BSD-style licenses in their 
> comment headers!) types of licenses.  It was just the safe thing to do 
> from our perspective, even if we were not even enabling the GPL'd code.
> 

I suppose. But if its LGPL and Fabrice is amenable, it would seem you're
safe enough, particularly if you get something confirming your
interpretation from Fabrice. Then you get rid of any kind of overhead or
maintainability issues from your dynamic linking code.

> If you or anyone else has any other questions about how we interact with 
> QEMU in our Win4Lin Pro product, please ask.  I want to be as honest and 
> forward as possible with everyone, and hope that my company can work 
> together in harmony with this great QEMU community.
> 

More of an interesting intellectual excercise for me. That linking issue
just set off alarm bells in my head. But given LGPL or BSD everything
looks peachy.

> Thank you for your understanding,
> 

Thank you for taking an interest in sponsoring the work of QEMU
developers.

-- John.