Hello, > My name is Louis-Vincent DERIAN, and I work for STMicroelectronics.
I'm Håvard Eidnes, and in this context I'm merely a user of QEMU and a contributor to the NetBSD project. > We are interested in using your software to facilitate our > development and testing processes. We understand that QEMU is > open-source, but could you please confirm if it is free for > companies to use as well? Welcome to the wonderful world of open source software :) This is ultimately a legal question, and I'm not formally qualified to give any particular advice in that area. That said: There is in general no prohibition agiainst commercial use of open source software. However, to make a somewhat simplified example some of the licenses for QEMU include restrictions to prevent you or your company from making your own extensions / modifications to QEMU for others to use, and not also publish as open source the source code for these extensions / modifications. NetBSD's pkgsrc system categorizes the licensing terms of things they package, and have for QEMU listed LICENSE= gnu-gpl-v2 AND gnu-lgpl-v2.1 AND mit AND modified-bsd This is mostly consistent with the contents of the LICENSE file you find in the top directory of the source distribution of QEMU which spells this out in a bit more details (and is more authoitative, of course; the above LICENSE setting is simply a summary). You can find copies of these referenced licenses at https://github.com/NetBSD/pkgsrc/blob/trunk/licenses/gnu-gpl-v2 https://github.com/NetBSD/pkgsrc/blob/trunk/licenses/gnu-lgpl-v2.1 https://github.com/NetBSD/pkgsrc/blob/trunk/licenses/mit https://github.com/NetBSD/pkgsrc/blob/trunk/licenses/modified-bsd (and certainly other places, these are merely copies.) Best regards, - Håvard
