Open Stack

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Dague [mailto:sean at dague.net]
> Sent: Friday, December 4, 2015 9:47 PM
> To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] Testing concerns around boot from UEFI
> spec
> 
> On 12/04/2015 08:34 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> For upstream CI that's also a bar that's set. So for 3rd party, it would probably be
> fine, but upstream won't happen.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 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.
> 

It should be due to MIT copyright addition that distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, QEMU... don't include OVMF. But the MS patent looks like be recently expired. So the addition will be removed later, and once removed we will work to make OVMF a standard part of distributions.

Thanks,
Qiaowei