Licensing? Was: Removing Optical Boot Requirement from F20 Alpha Release Requirements

[Chris Murphy]

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