On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 11:13:22AM +0200, Dario Lesca wrote: > Why Fedora not have in our standard repo the open-vm-tools package? > > http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/ > > > linux-0chi:~ # rpm -qi open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-21.1 > > Name : open-vm-tools Relocations: (not relocatable) > > Version : 2008.04.14 Vendor: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany > > .... > > Group : System/Emulators/PC Source RPM: open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-21.1.src.rpm > > Size : 1495998 License: BSD 3-Clause; GPL v2 only; LGPL v2.1 only > > .... > > Summary : Open Virtual Machine Tools > > Description : > > Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source > > implementation of VMware Tools. > > It's a License Problem? As you can see from text you quoted the License(s) are all open source and allowed by Fedora. A quick look at the code and it seems these license tags are accurate too. The open-vm-tools contains a mixture of userspace libraries/agents, and a bunch of kernel modules. The kernel modules will not be allowed in Fedora as per packaging standards. Anyone is free to package up the userspace tools. Despite their generic sounding name they are really only useful for VMWare because the host<->guest communication protocl is utter crackrock, relying on poking a special (potentially unsafe) IO port, and not portable to non-x86 architectures. Furthermore 'vm tools' as a concept really shouldn't need to even exist. Each bit of functionality should be integrated into the appropriate existing application or tool, so things 'just work' in a VM without needing install of special packages. eg mouse / video drivers are already part of Xorg as standard. The hgfs mount helper program should just be part of util-lnux; monitoring extensions added to existing monitoring tools like collectd or nagios. Don't let that stop you packaging it up if you want it in Fedora though. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
