51–60 of 299 posts
As a VMWare customer, this makes me consider their ethics. If they're unethical, shouldn't we look into switching away from their product? I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space - Hyper-V certainly, but that's less of an option for some. Short of rearchitecting our service as a series of containers, what action can conscientious corporate leaders take?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not fully up-to-date on this case, but there is a bit of wiggle room on what counts as a derivative work, even in kernelspace. My favorite example is OpenAFS. Development of the AFS kernel module started in 1983, so the code is a decade older than Linux itself. So it's hard to argue that openafs.ko is a derivative work of Linux, and since it continues to run on several kernels other than Linux (Darwin, Solaris, N…
From the wording in the link it sounds like they include modified GPL code and don't publish that, not that they are expected to open-source ESXi (or whatever it is called right now) entirely: > In 2011, Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide nor offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products (as required by BusyBox's license, GPLv2).
From the FAQ at http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq... :
"[...] admittedly, VMware made substantial and good efforts toward compliance on BusyBox. However, VMware still refused to fix a few minor and one major compliance problem that we discovered during the process. Namely, there was a major violation regarding Linux itself that ultimately became Christoph's key complaint in this lawsuit."
Not trying to be a naysayer, but I wonder if this will accomplish anything? (since the case is in Germany and not the US where VMWare is incorporated)
[1]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/12/paris-lawsuit-f...
[2]http://www.themarysue.com/france-sues-google-autocomplete/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle's Virtualbox? Oh, you said ethics...nevermind.
Abstracting from ethics, Virtualbox is probably not a suitable replacement for ESXi. Oracle VM Server might be. But then, you could use Xen directly.
XenServer is also 100% open sourced now by Citrix. It's a completely free product with all the features, but you can pay Citrix for enterprise support if you want/need it.
If I'm not mistaken this is the first instance of a kernel developer participating in a GPL lawsuit. That could bring a whole new era of GPL lawsuits.
In particular, this isn't just a question of whether a kernel module is a derived work of the kernel. Apparently VMWare has copied code from the Linux kernel, with GPLed headers on top, and compiled that code directly into some of their code.
I very much doubt the accuracy of their claims that vmkernel is largely a copy of linux ( http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_... ) Mostly since in many of those drivers, it performs better than linux, but also because vmware did not hire idiots, (and non-idiots know not to ever use GPL code). Source: worked there a while ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It started out that way, but as I understand the release materials here, this is now about Hellwig's copyright on core kernel code (e.g. the VFS), which VMWare has integrated into their product. I wonder what they're thinking. At least with nVidia there's a plausible sounding defense that goes like "hey, we just wrote a shim to load this platform independent code we already had lying around, so our platform independe…
I've seen it argued on HN that the GPL's definition of a derivative work differs from the legal definition, and if you never distribute the GPL'd code, you aren't bound by it. Thus, one could write kernel drivers, which (it was argued) are not derivative works under copyright, and be safe as long as the kernel is not redistributed by the same entity.
"that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language"
I'm not entirely sure what to do with this.
If I'm not mistaken this is the first instance of a kernel developer participating in a GPL lawsuit. That could bring a whole new era of GPL lawsuits.