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On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 07:43:41AM -0500, Sean Dague wrote:
> Can someone explain the licensing issue here? The Fedora comments make
> this sound like this is something that's not likely to end up in distros.

The EDK codebase contains a FAT driver which has a license that forbids
reusing the code outside of the EDK project.

[quote]
Additional terms: In addition to the forgoing, redistribution and use
of the code is conditioned upon the FAT 32 File System Driver and all
derivative works thereof being used for and designed only to read
and/or write to a file system that is directly managed by Intel's
Extensible Firmware Initiative (EFI) Specification v. 1.0 and later
and/or the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Forum's UEFI
Specifications v.2.0 and later (together the "UEFI Specifications");
only as necessary to emulate an implementation of the UEFI Specifications;
and to create firmware, applications, utilities and/or drivers.
[/quote]

So while the code is open source, it is under a non-free license,
hence Fedora will not ship it. For RHEL we're reluctantly choosing
to ship it as an exception to our normal policy, since its the only
immediate way to make UEFI support available on x86 & aarch64

So I don't think the license is a reason to refuse to allow the UEFI
feature into Nova though, nor should it prevent us using the current
EDK bios in CI for testing purposes. It is really just an issue for
distros which only want 100% free software.

Unless the license on the existing code gets resolved, some Red Hat
maintainers have a plan to replace the existing FAT driver with an
alternative impl likely under GPL. At that time, it'll be acceptable
for inclusion in Fedora.

> 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.

Regards,
Daniel
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