VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation • Hacker News Board

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#81

Post by shmerl » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:57 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #75

Busybox strikes again. I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will rele…

Or you know, they can stop being jerks and release sources for the code they derived from the GPLed one.

> It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar

It should register.

> Similarly any concerns raised by engineering are never taken seriously by the legal council.

Not in any serious company to my experience. Being so lax on legal matters for such company shows very low level of their management's professionalism.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#82

Post by geofft » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #20

geofft wrote: post #7

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…

Right. Part of this seems to be related to something I wrote about back in 2007 when I was an industry analyst: http://vmblog.com/archive/2007/08/22/vmware-and-the-gpl.aspx (IANAL, my opinion only, etc.)

That's a great link. That clarifies the relationship between the vmkernel and Linux.

And I think it's closer to how I think vmmon works in Workstation: you load the module, and as part of initialization, it hoists itself as owner of the CPU and stuffs the existing system in a world, creating what Xen would call "dom0". If I'm reading you right, it sounds like ESX uses "vmnix" to boot from disk and initialize hardware, and then loads vmkernel in a way that does not link with vmnix at all (unlike Linux module loading), hands over control of the processor to vmkernel, and puts itself in a world.

Two things worth noting about how the world has changed since 2007: VMware has made the shell much less extensive in ESXi (which was one of the major changes: ESX was very Red Hat-based, and ESXi's UNIX parts are just enough busybox to make things work and the shell is disabled by default), and Linux has been pushing back more on proprietary drivers using in-kernel interfaces (see, like, Nvidia and DMA-BUF).

I still think that VMware needs Linux for hardware compatibility. If it's at all legal, they'd be wasting their time implementing support for every last SCSI controller, network card, etc. on their own -- and Linux is far ahead in cases where you need reverse engineering or politicking to get support. I don't know how good the BSDs are at this sort of thing; I'm curious if they'd solve this problem well enough on server hardware.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#83

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #75

Busybox strikes again. I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will rele…

[deleted]

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#84

Post by aabbccdd » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #67

JoshTriplett wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what you're looking to do, you might investigate Xen or KVM, possibly with OpenStack on top.

The problem with OpenStack as a replacement for VMware (outside of the complexity of installation), is that most people using VMware have an expectation of high availability being table stakes (a VM automatically being rebooted on a different node in the event of a node failure). OpenStack assumes the software on the front end can tolerate a node going down in it's current form and that the front-end application will…

SUSE offers High Availability support for the recently released SUSE Openstack Cloud 5

https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/

Additionally it supports some components from vmWare: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_d...

Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#85

Post by wosos » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #13

Good, I donated here: http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-app...

Same here

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#86

Post by the_af » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #81

huhtenberg wrote: post #75

Busybox strikes again. I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will rele…

Or you know, they can stop being jerks and release sources for the code they derived from the GPLed one. > It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar It should register. > Similarly any concerns raised by engineering are never taken seriously by the legal council. Not in any serious company to my experience. Being so lax on legal matters for such company shows very low level of their man…

Especially since the GPL is one of the most widely known copyleft licenses out there. I can expect a layman to not know about it, but the software engineers at VMWare?

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#87

Post by geofft » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #75

Busybox strikes again. I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will rele…

It's not really about busybox. Conservancy started looking at the use of Busybox, and then realized that vmkernel was using the Linux kernel in ways that (in their eyes) violated the Linux kernel's license. The present lawsuit is about that, and Christoph Hellwig is suing as a Linux rightsholder.

Swapping out Linux in vmkernel would be much harder.

See their FAQ (or one of the other comment threads here) for more info: http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq...

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#88

Post by Nanzikambe » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #14

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?

kvm/qemu + virt-manager, switched from vmware-server ages ago & never looked back.

Granted my needs are hardly enterprise scale, but may be worth you taking a look (if you haven't already)

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#89

Post by shmerl » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #86

shmerl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, they can stop being jerks and release sources for the code they derived from the GPLed one. > It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar It should register. > Similarly any concerns raised by engineering are never taken seriously by the legal council. Not in any serious company to my experience. Being so lax on legal matters for such company shows very low level of their man…

Especially since the GPL is one of the most widely known copyleft licenses out there. I can expect a layman to not know about it, but the software engineers at VMWare?

It sounds from the above comment that even if engineers raise this issue, their legal department dismisses it. I find it bizarre for any serious company.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#90

Post by th0br0 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #75

Busybox strikes again. I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will rele…

Was said lawsuit also taking place in Germany? IANAL, but my understanding of the German copyright law (being a citizen of said country) is that such a proof is not a possible solution.