Proposed SIG: Windows MinGW cross-compiler SIG

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 12:17:47PM -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> 
> "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > [...] I said it's not a problem for the MinGW SIG (ie. Fedora), but
> > it is a problem for the libvirt project.
> 
> So it is that important to you to permit someone to distribute
> proprietary libvirt-based applications that run *on windows*?
> Is providing this sort of enablement important to Fedora?

IMHO, yes. We've had alot of feedback that people really like the libraries
we provide for managing virtualized Fedora / Linux hosts, and they'd like
to make use of our libraries in their existing closed source management 
tools. Not  having Windows support for our management tools is a show-stopper
for many potential users though.

So by providing libvirt client bits on Windows we enable more people to
deploy & manage virtualized Fedora hosts. This will increase the number
of people using Fedora and virtualization which is a good thing for the
Fedora community. It also helps the libvirt community which becomes a
defacto standard open source managment  API across platforms, at a time
when all other virt vendors would rather their users were locked into 
proprietry custom APIs & tools.

If we only provided GPL'd libraries for libvirt on Windows they simply
won't use libvirt or Fedora virtualization, pushing more people towards
closed source virt solutuons like VMWare 

Daniel
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