Re: [Qemu-devel] [edk2] license for binary drivers

[Andrew Fish]

On Aug 6, 2014, at 6:44 AM, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:

> Il 06/08/2014 12:34, Laszlo Ersek ha scritto:
>> So no, you can't ship an OVMF binary (or source tarball) that contains
>> the FAT driver, bundled as part of the GPLv2 (+compatible) QEMU
>> distribution, either in source or in binary form.
> 
> What Laszlo said is mostly my understanding too (IANAL etc.).
> 
> Just one thing: the GPL does allow you to "merely aggregate" the OVMF
> binaries with QEMU sources or QEMU binaries; and a lawyer could also
> tell you the if QEMU were to ship OVMF binaries in its tarball, it would
> be mere aggregation.  It would then be allowed by the GPL.
> 
> I wouldn't disagree; the OVMF binaries are just data as far as QEMU is
> concerned.
> 
> However, the non-free nature of the OVMF binaries mean that QEMU will
> never ever ship OVMF binaries until the license is fixed for the
> offending FAT driver.  Not only because we don't want to get into legal
> minefields, but also because QEMU is free software and wants to keep its
> distributed releases entirely free.
> 

IANAL, but this stuff seems kind of free . Reverse engineering something does 
not make it free. Copying other peoples work and changing the license does not 
make it free. Nothing that the edk2 or QEMU developers do changes the 
Intellectual Property rights that are associated with the FAT file system. 

The IP for FAT was contributed to UEFI, and the specification that includes the 
license in question was created. The edk2 FAT driver was coded to this 
specification and thus has this license. Which means you can use FAT for UEFI 
firmware without paying a licensing fee. So from a commercial point of view the 
edk2 FAT driver is “free”. 

How you write a GPL licensed FAT driver seems like a legal quagmire. Probably 
something better discussed with a lawyer.  From the outside looking in it seems 
like the IP rights are enforced by charging licensing fees to devices that 
support FAT. So free can still cost you….

Thanks,

Andrew Fish

PS The original pre-release version of the EFI spec had a simple file system 
defined, but we got feedback that adding (and maintaining) a new file system on 
a large number of operating systems would be a pain, and that is how we ended 
up with FAT32.  Well at least we got GPT in the spec….

> Paolo
> 
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