On Fri, 2015-12-04 at 08:46 -0500, Sean Dague wrote: > On 12/04/2015 08:34 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 07:43:41AM -0500, Sean Dague wrote: > > > That seems weird enough that I'd rather push back on our Platinum > > > Board > > > member to fix the licensing before we let this in. Especially as > > > this > > > feature is being drive by Intel. > > > > As copyright holder, Intel could choose to change the license of > > their > > code to make it free software avoiding all the problems. None the > > less, > > as above, I don't think this is a blocker for inclusion of the > > feature > > in Nova, nor our testing of it.
Actually, it's a bit over simplified to claim this. The origins of this clause are in the covenants not to sue in the FAT spec: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4cc9-843a-92 3143f3456c/fatgen103.doc It's clause 1(e). The reason for the clause is a complex negotiation over the UEFI spec (Microsoft committed to a royalty free implementation and UEFI needed to use FAT for backward compatibility with older BIOS). The problem is that the litigation history no longer supports claiming the patents are invalid: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Microsoft_FAT_patents As you can see, they're mostly expired (in the US) but the last one will expire in 2020 (if I calculate the date correctly). No corporation (including Intel) can safely release a driver under a licence that doesn't respect the FAT covenant not to sue without being subject to potential accusations of contributory infringement. So, you're right, Intel could release the FAT 32 driver under a non -restricted licence as you say but only if they effectively take on liability for potential infringement for every downstream user ... amazingly enough they don't want to do that. Red Hat could do the same, of course: just strip the additional restrictions clause; Intel won't enforce it; then Red Hat would take on all the liability ... The FAT driver is fully separated from the EDKII source: https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Edk2-fat-driver So it can easily be replaced. The problem is how when every UEFI driver or update comes on a FAT32 format system. > That's fair. However we could also force having this conversation > again, and pay it forward to the larger open source community by > getting this ridiculous licensing fixed. We did the same thing with > some other libraries in the past. The only way to "fix" the licence is to either get Microsoft to extend the covenant not to sue to all open source projects (I suppose not impossible given they're making friendlier open source noises) or wait for the patents to expire. James __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
