Re: [Qemu-devel] fpu/softfloat.c licensing

[Markus Armbruster]

Alexander Graf <address@hidden> writes:

> On 21.05.14 09:51, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> Il 21/05/2014 05:54, Alexey Kardashevskiy ha scritto:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> We recently discovered that not entire QEMU is GPL2-compatible, the fpu
>>> emulation has a different license (copied below) which might create
>>> legal
>>> problems because of that "INDEMNIFY" statement.
>>>
>>> Does anyone else care (except IBM)?
>>>
>>> What would the proper solution be? Ask the creator to relicense it under
>>> GPL? I failed to find a contact as the homepage on berkeley.edu is
>>> restricted. Rewrite the code? This code is used in FPU emulation
>>> for TCG,
>>> is that the only use of it? If it should not get called for KVM,
>>> that would
>>> be a temporary band-aid for us :)
>>
>> http://marc.info/?l=qemu-devel&m=136725946312880&w=4
>>
>> The following people haven't acked the relicensing of their
>> contributions from softfloat-2b to softfloat-2a or GPLv2+ yet:
>>
>> Fabrice Bellard <address@hidden>
>>     1d6bda356153c82e100680d9f2165e32c8fb1330
>>     750afe93fd15fafc20b6c34d30f339547d15c2d1
>>
>> Jocelyn Mayer
>>     75d62a585629cdc1ae0d530189653cb1d8d9c53c
>>
>> Thiemo Seufer's parents (Stefan said he'd contact them)
>>     5a6932d51d1b34b68b3f10fc5ac65598bece88c0
>>     924b2c07cdfaba9ac408fc5fa77da75a570f9dc5
>>     b645bb48850fea8db017026897827f0ab42fbdea
>>     fc81ba536bc3d8cdbcf9e92369e9bc5ede69da10
>>
>> This list only includes people whose contributions has not been
>> reverted in the meanwhile.
>
> How many % of the overall commits does that make? IIRC you can
> relicense source code if the "majority of authors" agrees and nobody
> actively disagrees - or so. But IANAL :)

You can get away with infringing copyright if nobody actively sues you.

Sorry, not an option.  We have to rip out contributions we can't get
relicensed.  Except for contributions that don't qualify for copyright
protection, but that's shaky ground; let's not go there.