151–160 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?
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I doubt that it'll come to that. There are some really nasty consequences of being found to violate the GPL: 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License... From what I understand, there is no obvious…
That would be an interesting result. To my knowledge the GPL (any version) hasn't actually been litigated to the point of a published decision (would love to hear that it had). That said, (and continuing with my possibly incorrect assumption that the GPL hasn't been litigated) if it does get decided that this remedy can be enforced by the license holders through the court, I expect it will create the largest software…
If a company want to remove this risk, they can't license someone else work. That mean no third-party engine, no font types, no xml parsing library. The cost vs risk is so insanely on the cost side that it would be fools and fools only who rather make everything inhouse in fear of follow simple industry practices that has existed for 20 years or more.
If you link together GPL'ed work with something you distribute, release the source code for that work. That is not a more risky proposition that say, giving 5% for using unreal engine.
LWN has a very clear explanation of just how clear-cut this is: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/635290/e501ce0264c182f4/ 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.
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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.
The GPL does say the conditions are only on redistribution. But I think that's how it works with other derived works as well, by default. The GPL is all about how you can relicense it to other people using only the same license, you're free to do whatever you want if you never give anyone your modified code.
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?
Hyper-V is great, also System Center Virtual Machine manager kicks the pants out of VCloud Director and friends. If you prefer a more hands on approach just plain Xen or KVM is a great option too. As for orchestration in that space have a look at running Openstack or Xen Orchestra etc.
If your goal is VM orchestration, and you are not ready to go full self-service via OpenStack and similar, then we also provide a product called CloudForms (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudf...).
Basic idea is that it allows you to manage your hypervisors/VMs, regardless of what you are using (VMware, RHEV, EC2, etc). By manage, I mean that you can provision and implement policies around anything that might be done to a VM. For example, it can require a manager approve an VMs deployed into the production data center.
It takes a lot of configuration, but fills a gap between IT provisions all VMs and full self service.
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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.
There is however a big caveat whenever you try to "hack" around law. If the author explicit state that "I do not wish X to happen to my work" and someone technically comply but in practice make so X happens anyway, then a judges ruling can go anywhere. See the Pirate Bay or the Aereo case where arguments for such "hacks" has been made.
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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…
> Being so lax on legal matters for such company shows very low level of their management's professionalism. Actually, no, it doesn't. It merely means that the management views GPL violations as a low-probability calculated risk. As in "we know that we can be in compliance, but we won't be wasting any resources on it until it's justified". It has nothing to do with the professionalism.
Which shows stupidity of that management, which thinks that legal violations are acceptable as long as they can view them as "low risk". Or it simply means it's a company of crooks. Either one is not a professional environment.
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They still use it for bootstrapping, right? I know they've gotten rid of the Red Hat-ish userspace, but according to the LWN article, there's still a Linux kernel involved and a kernel module used to pass control to vmkernel. (Is the word "vmnix" wrong? Does it apply only to the entire Red Hat-ish distribution in the COS, and not to the Linux stepping stone alone?)
Nope, that stuff is all gone with the ESXi product. The vmkernel can bootstrap itself now. Basically the old 1.0 - 4.0 process for _ESX_ was like this: * Bootloader * Linux Kernel boot * Load VMnix module. * Load VMkernel * hardware control passed to VMkernel * Linux continues running as a sort of 'super' VM with some limited hardware access. For _ESXi_ from 4.0 - now : * Bootloader * VMkernel
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The GPL has been tested in courts all over the world. VMWare is insane to continue violating it after being informed of the problems and to then refuse cooperation. They'll probably pay up and drop dead once someone mumbles injunction.
VMWare is insane to continue violating it after being informed Or maybe, they don't agree that they are?
My god, it's so simple...