Re: [Qemu-devel] Merging improvements from VirtualBox OSE into qemu?

[Anthony Liguori]

Frank Mehnert wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 December 2008, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>   
> > Sharing implies a two-way exchange.  In reality, VirtualBox has taken a
> > bunch of QEMU code and AFAIK has not shared any of their changes back
> > with the QEMU community.  They are completely entitled to do this of
> > course based on the licensing of QEMU.
> >     
>
> Sorry, that is not true.

As I said, sharing implies a two-way exchange.  The VirtualBox 
development was not done publicly and to the best of my knowledge, no 
attempt has been made by the VirtualBox developers to push any of their 
changes back into QEMU.  All other virtualization projects (Xen and it's 
variants, KVM, etc.) have made an attempt to push changes back to QEMU.

Yes, you have a public SVN that appeared long after your development 
started.  Are we supposed to troll through it looking for changes that 
may or may not be applicable to upstream?  It's extraordinarily 
difficult because you've made a huge number of changes to your QEMU fork 
that have nothing to do with bug fixes.

This is not how Open Source development works.  You don't make a bunch 
of changes private, put out a repo after the fact, and make no attempt 
to work with any of the projects you took the majority of your code 
from.  You can call it open all you want but it simply isn't.  We won't 
even get into the whole contributor agreement non-sense.

> > Some of their most interesting changes (like SATA emulation, rewritten
> > USB emulation) remain available only in their closed source version.  I
> > find that extremely unfortunate because that would be some of the
> > easiest and most useful code to try to merge from their project.
> >     
>
> Some of these parts might be available under GPL in the future.
>   

That would be nice but I'm not going to hold my breathe.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Kind regards,
>
> Frank
>