David Woodhouse dwmw2@infradead.org writes:
On Fri, 2013-05-31 at 08:04 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
<soapbox>
Fork OVMF, drop the fat module, and just add GPL code. It's an easily solvable problem.
Heh. Actually it doesn't need to be a fork. It's modular, and the FAT driver is just a single module. Which is actually included in *binary* form in the EDK2 repository, I believe, and its source code is elsewhere.
We could happily make a GPL¹ or LGPL implementation of a FAT module and build our OVMF with that instead, and we wouldn't need to fork OVMF at all.
So can't we have GPL virtio modules too? I don't think there's any problem there except for the FAT module.
I would propose more of a virtual fork. It could consist of a git repo with the GPL modules + a submodule for edk2. Ideally, there would be no need to actually fork edk2.
My assumption is that edk2 won't take GPL code. But does ovmf really need to live in the edk2 tree?
If we're going to get serious about supporting OVMF, it we need something that isn't proprietary.
-- dwmw2
¹ If it's GPL, of course, then we mustn't include any *other* binary blobs in our OVMF build. But the whole point in this conversation is that we don't *want* to do that. So that's fine.
It's even more fundamental. OVMF as a whole (at least in it's usable form) is not Open Source. Without even tackling the issue of GPL code sharing, that is a fundamental problem that needs to be solved if we're going to serious about making changes to QEMU to support it.
I think solving the general problem will also enable GPL code sharing though.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori