Ideology fanatics
I am subscribed to pretty much mailing lists, like I wanted to send in a patch for something and the list was members only, thus I subscribed and forgot to unsubscribe.
The same is the case for QEMU for which I have sent in some patches (VPC and Bochs image support) some two years ago. Since that I was not able to follow it strictly, but every now and then I read the interestingly looking mails.
First, as an introduction, you need to know, that QEMU is a multiple machine emulator (the best freely available now?) with optional support for virtualization (like VMware). In that case, when running the emulator on an Intel host for the purpose of running for example Windows on it, the instructions wont be emulated, but executed by the CPU. This is much faster of course than emulaton.
So. Originally, Fabrice Bellard (who is the primary author of QEMU) wrote the QEMU Accelerator (also called kqemu)- the virtualization helper kernel module – as an addition and made it available as binary only, with a proprietary license, while Qemu itself is GPL/LGPL. This is legal of course.
And now comes the misery. Every now and then, people get to the list, and without doing anything in favor of the project and people, just write some ranting words like: Yo, this is not ethical, make it open.
These people just don’t catch it. They get it for free, damn.
You need to know that there is also a free (as in freedom) virtualization module for QEMU called qvm86. Use it if you dont like the binary blob.
As an interesting addition, on the QEMU Accelerator some years ago there was a note, that if someone pays enough money, he will make it open. But that paragraph is gone now.
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The one getting something for free is Fabrice – he gets the Linux kernel. Just ask any kernel developer what they think about proprietary kernel modules. Proprietary Linux kernel modules are legally questionable and morally wrong.
— Diego Biurrun Jul 29, 10:07 PM #