Licensing? Was: Removing Optical Boot Requirement from F20 Alpha Release Requirements
Chris Murphy
lists at colorremedies.com
Thu Sep 19 22:26:06 UTC 2013
On Sep 19, 2013, at 4:13 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
> I understand that distinction but as there is a FAT driver in the linux kernel distributed with Fedora, I don't see why it's suddenly a problem for an EFI virtual firmware that needs a FAT driver to ship with Fedora.
>
> Also, Virtualbox includes a UEFI virtual firmware that can read EFI FAT and it's also open source and isn't run afoul of licensing issues insofar as I'm aware.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?title=Edk2-fat-driver
License addition reads in part (simplification mine): used for and designed only to read and/or write to an EFI/UEFI file system only as necessary to emulate an implementation of the UEFI Specifications; and to create firmware, applications, utilities and/or drivers.
So I guess it's this limitation of the driver for a non-general purpose that's running afoul of Fedora's requirements, not that Fedora is running afoul of the driver license? If so, this is a problem for the Fedora license to be unable to ever ship with a virtualized UEFI firmware. One day we're going to want to securely boot VM's.
Chris Murphy
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