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Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

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Re: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

#5

Post by osivertsson »

Some quotes that I feel shows VMware's attitude towards the software freedom community:

[...] the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi.

At times their lawyers made statements like linux is this small yellow box in the left bottom corner (of our diagram). So of course already the diagrams are drawn in a way to twist the facts according to their view on reality.

Re: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

#6

Post by xingxiong »

osivertsson wrote: post #5

Some quotes that I feel shows VMware's attitude towards the software freedom community: [...] the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi. At times their lawyers made statements like linux is this small yellow box in the left bottom corner (of our diagram).…

One should make a graph showing man years put into each part and see how big the kernel would be compared to the wmware parts. It would most likely paint a completely different picture and also show the importance of that 1 percent of the plaintiff.

Re: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

#8

Post by devit »

osivertsson wrote: post #5

Some quotes that I feel shows VMware's attitude towards the software freedom community: [...] the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi. At times their lawyers made statements like linux is this small yellow box in the left bottom corner (of our diagram).…

Considering that there are definitely more than a hundred major contributors to the Linux kernel, it's not unreasonable that a single one's contributions only make up 1% of the total.

Re: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

#9

Post by revelation »

devit wrote: post #8
osivertsson wrote: post #5

Some quotes that I feel shows VMware's attitude towards the software freedom community: [...] the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi. At times their lawyers made statements like linux is this small yellow box in the left bottom corner (of our diagram).…

Considering that there are definitely more than a hundred major contributors to the Linux kernel, it's not unreasonable that a single one's contributions only make up 1% of the total.

1% would be a massive, massive part of Linux. I'd be surprised to find any one kernel developer that has 1%.

Re: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

#10

Post by delsarto »

osivertsson wrote: post #5

Some quotes that I feel shows VMware's attitude towards the software freedom community: [...] the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi. At times their lawyers made statements like linux is this small yellow box in the left bottom corner (of our diagram).…

What did you expect them to say? Linux is a huge part of what we do?

Here's how I see it. Vmkernel has a driver API. It's documented, versioned, comes with a ddk and has drivers written directly to it.

As we all know, Linux basically has driver apis. They are not as explicit as the vmkernel driver apis; they are not versioned and deliberately unstable - but if you've written a line of kernel code you know they are there.

Now it seems it is OK to ship a binary blob driver that links against Linux driver apis. Nvidia, ati, lots of arm type boards and now zfs. I say seems because, well, so far everyone has pretty much gone along with it. In some of the comments on zfs, I see people go as far to say that the Linux driver APIs are tacitly considered lgpl (ie. similar to why you can ship a binary against glibc - although obviously glibc has made the exception explicit)

Can I do the reverse? Implement a GPL licensed wrapper that converts the Linux driver API to one provided by a binary blob (ie. what vmklinux does talking to vmkernel) and thus use the drivers?

I don't know, I think it's a good question to find an answer to.

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