[libvirt] [PATCH 1/1] [RFC] Parallels Server Bare Metal driver stub

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 06:01:24PM +0400, Dmitry Mishin wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, September 28, 2011 05:34:47 PM Daniel Veillard wrote:
> [...]
> > > +int psbmApiInit(struct psbm_driver *driver)
> > > +{
> > > +    const char *libname = "libprl_sdk.so";
> > > +    void *handle = NULL;
> > > +    PRL_RESULT res;
> > 
> >   That I dislike, sorry this must not be dlopen'ed in at runtime,
> > but checked in at configure time and properly linked in. Also
> > means that proper dependancies and packaging have to be in place.
> I exactly want to avoid dependencies.
> 
> Library can be used both remotely (for example, on Fedora host) and locally 
> (on PSBM host). And if in the local case we can create special libvirt rpm 
> with enabled PSBM support and integrate it to distribution, in remote case we 
> force user to download not only Parallels SDK rpm (which will hardly be 
> included to Fedora due to proprietary license), but also fixed libvirt package 
> instead of already installed one. Is it preferable way from your point of 
> view?
> 
> > 
> > > +    handle = dlopen(libname, RTLD_LAZY);
> > > +    if (!handle) {
> > > +        psbmError(VIR_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR,
> > > +                  _("Failed to load SDK library %s %s"), libname,
> > > dlerror()); +        return VIR_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR;
> > > +    }
> > 
> >   So what is that SDK library, how is it distributed and what is the
> > licencing for it ? As much as I like adding a driver, I would like to
> > make sure the deployement is clean and there is no licencing issues.
> > 
> >   Any pointers ? All I found was
> >   http://www.parallels.com/ptn/download/sdk/
> > and it's quite silent on code availability and Licence for the
> > libraries.
> It has a proprietary license and not open sourced now. Is it a problem? 

If the license is not LGPLv2+ compatible, then it can't be used
by libvirt, regardless of whether it is directly linked, or
dlopened. In other words using 'dlopen' doesn't magically solve
the license compatibility problem.

Daniel
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