VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

Post by blfr » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #116

ChuckMcM wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" The business risk would become too great that they might be litigated by a rival into inoperation. " Only the owners of a copyright have standing to sue, so I think the complete version of your concept fails unless, like in this case, the copyrights are held by many people instead of being assigned to one person or organization. I also can't imagine that a lot of companies haven't considered this risk, it hardly ma…

Post by fl0wenol » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

kion wrote: post #140

geofft wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by TallGuyShort » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #108

The GNU license doesn't sound very "free" to me. It's strange that the owners of GNU code think that all additions to their code should rightly be released to the public (even if they never wrote the additions). The original code is still "free" for the world to use, so there really isn't anything being taken.

Post by rnovak » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

delsarto wrote: post #149

JoshTriplett wrote: post #57

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.

I don't think it is as clear cut at all, but that makes it much more interesting. I left a comment there, but it bears some repeating I think ESXi's kernel does not bootstrap itself from Linux at all. There is no linux kernel as such [1] ESXi does reuse linux kernel drivers ... a lot of them. But the way this happens is through a well-defined API provided by (proprietary) vmkernel called vmkapi. What you are seeing i…

    Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed 
    to provide nor offer any source code for the 
    version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products

    But ESXi is not a purely open-source product;
    it also contains a proprietary component called
    "vmkernel."

    VMware's developers appear to have taken a 
    substantial amount of kernel code, adapted 
    it heavily, and built it directly into 
    vmkernel itself

    

Post by jordigh » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #163

jordigh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside, shouldn't you be parsimonious with subscriber links for LWN and not post them publicly? I haven't had a LWN subscription in a while, but I really like their business model. I would not have posted this link myself.

No, the subscriber links are for exactly this kind of situation. They are to allow you to link to articles when it's relevant to a discussion, as long as you don't abuse them by doing something like posting a regular feed of all LWN articles or submitting every single one to Reddit/HN. Jonathan Corbet, editor of LWN, frequently posts his own subscriber links to LWN articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=…