Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 05/10] qemu-ga: Add configure options to specify path to Windows/VSS SDK

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 12:54:04PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 28/06/2013 12:43, Daniel P. Berrange ha scritto:
> > On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 01:16:38PM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> >> On 06/06/13 17:06, Tomoki Sekiyama wrote:
> >>> To enable VSS support in qemu-ga for Windows, header files included in
> >>> VSS SDK are required.
> >>> The VSS support is enabled by the configure option like below:
> >>>   ./configure --with-vss-sdk="/path/to/VSS SDK"
> >>>
> >>> If the path is omitted, it tries to search the headers from default paths
> >>> and VSS support is enabled only if the SDK is found.
> >>> VSS support is disabled if --without-vss-sdk or --with-vss-sdk=no is
> >>> specified.
> >>>
> >>> VSS SDK is available from:
> >>>   http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23490
> >>>
> >>> To cross-compile using mingw, you need to setup the SDK on Windows
> >>> environments to extract headers. You can also extract the SDK headers on
> >>> POSIX environments using scripts/extract-vss-headers and msitools.
> > 
> > What is the license of the VSS SDK ?  In particular is the license
> > compatible with QEMU to allow us to link to it from GPL code ?
> 
> Doesn't it fall under the "operating system component" exception?

Maybe, maybe no. I think it depends what the VSS SDK actually includes.

IANAL, but my interpretation is that the exception would only apply
to stuff that is distributed as part of the base Windows install. Since
this is a separate download from Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that
the exception would apply in this case.

Does the VSS SDK actually include the .dll library that qemu-ga would
be linking aginst, or is the .dll part of base windows install, and
VSS SDK merely includes the header files needed for compilation ?

If in doubt, I always tend to err on the side of caution when dealing
with licensing for any microsoft provided software.

Daniel
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