Re: [Qemu-devel] Set up github repo for pmon sources

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 10:39:49PM +0100, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Mar 2019, Eric Blake wrote:
> > On 3/15/19 9:06 PM, Andrew Randrianasulu wrote:
> > > https://github.com/Randrianasulu/pmon/commits/2014
> > > 
> > > hopefully it will stay this way.
> > > 
> > > Anyone know what license I must pick for this?
> > > 3-clause BSD? 4-clause BSD? (from Copyright file it lists 4 terms)
> > 
> > 4-clause BSD is incompatible with the GPL, and thus cannot be used for
> > qemu.  (2-clause and 3-clause are okay, though).
> 
> To clarify, this is the firmware of the mips_fulong2e board. So it's a
> separate project but would make the board work more like the real hardware.
> We don't use code from this firmware in QEMU itself but including the
> firmware binary would make it simpler to run the board. If we include a
> binary we should probably also provide the source (even if BSD license does
> not require that) for convenience in roms, mirrored from the above git repo
> like for other firmwares. Is it still incompatible for that? What should be
> the preferred way then? Can we put the binary and source on qemu.org
> somewhere and link to it so it's not distributed with QEMU but still easy to
> get?

As this is just a self-contained firmware whose build is completely separate
from the QEMU build, & produces standalone output file not linked / integrated
with QEMU except at runtime, it would not be considered a combined work with
main QEMU codebase. As such the GPL incompatiblity would not come into effect.

As the same time though, BSD-with-advertizing clause is an unpleasant
license, so on general principles I'd be against including it in the
QEMU git repo regardless of the GPL license compatibility point.

This kind of issue would be entirely avoided if all firmwares were
separate from QEMU.

Regards,
Daniel
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