[Qemu-discuss] Possible GPL infringement of QEMU/SeaBIOS code

[Calvin]

[Originally sent to -dev, thought that was the wrong ML – sorry if duplicated!]

 

After the collapse of VMware’s Hosted UI divison, there’s been talks about a new virtualization platform for Mac called “Veertu” [1] – it relies on OS X’s new native Hypervisor.framework/vmnet.framework. From a quick glance however, I think they are violating the GPL by using QEMU code (I presume it is an adaption of qemu-kvm to Hypervisor.framework) without attribution or releasing their changed sources. I’ve noticed the supported Ethernet cards are the same, and from a glance inside the bundle, I can see ROMs for all of QEMU’s supported VGA adapters, as well as the ROM itself being SeaBIOS. Furthermore, by looking inside of the “vmx” binary, this seems to be where they have put QEMU code. In there, you can see command-line switches, mentions of various dependencies of QEMU, and various other strings that indicate QEMU – they seem to have removed the QEMU branding though. I haven’t seen any information in their application or on their site about this.

 

[1] http://veertu.com/