VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation • Hacker News Board

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#201

Post by wildfire » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 11:39 PM UTC

spinlock wrote: post #182

rnovak wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading the linked article, it read to me like the complaint asserts that VMKernel itself is a violation of the GPL. If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me, but these statements seems to point in this direction 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…

FYI - BusyBox is just a regular application that a kernel would run. It's not part of the kernel itself.

FYI - The complaint is regarding the VMWare ESXi kernel.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#202

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 11:53 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=…

Thanks for this comment. I have often wondered about this, and I'm really glad to discover that it's above board.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#203

Post by dijit » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 11:58 PM UTC

jsmeaton wrote: post #199

tw04 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the go-to is generally considered Redhat with their RHEV product line. There are a plethora of other options out there, but if you're looking for an open source path with enterprise support they are generally candidate #1. Oracle has an option but... ya. Citrix Xenserver would be the other major player.

Disclaimer; I'm not a sysadmin. Data point below is second hand knowledge from helping to track down issues with the ops team. Our company started with RHEV and ran into lots and lots of issues with it. There were compatibility issues between our VM infrastructure and SAN (firmware problems on one side, I forget which). Guests would just lock up all the time. There were other problems, but I'm not familiar with them.…

Controversial opinion here probably, but vmware has been doing virt for a long time, so it makes sense that it's rather polished if you fit there eco-system.

however qemu-kvm hasn't been around so long, it's still not anywhere near the adoption numbers such as Xen, however I've used it in production in three different large companies with great success.. the beauty is that more people who use it means more eyes on fixing it.

so for small things especially I'd really recommend it, and honestly I like it anyway, it feels very freeing to use libvirt/kvm- you have much finer grained controls than what vmware gives even in it's expensive offerings, and the best bit is that it's free as in beer- you can use all it's features without being in any kind of violation with licenses. the tools to administer it are ssh if you're familiar with unix or a GUI python program which gives you good control and graphs (works over ssh tooo, so encryption goodness) and works cross platform (last time I checked) contrasting to when I last used vmware:- you had to use there vsphere client which isn't ported to OSX or Linux.

I use Windows at work so it's not a problem, but I would prefer to run linux so I can actually use decent virtualisation solutions for small test labs, my company baulks at the cost of vmware workstation, and if I run linux for kvm then I cannot administer our massive ESX clusters..

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#204

Post by comex » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:00 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #104

nordsieck wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First of all, it has been litigated several times, at least in Germany. I'm on my phone, so here is only one example I quickly found by Googling:

http://www.timelex.eu/en/blog/detail/gpl-license-reaffirmed-...

Second, most businesses already avoid the GPL, but among those that can't, such as Android device makers - well, some of them seem to be fine with avoiding the edge cases by just publishing the source to their kernel modules. Considering this, I suspect that for the other half, it would not be the end of the world to have to reveal some minor secrets about the hardware or whatever; they just neglect to publish source because they are unlikely to be penalized any significant amount for doing so.

Of course, there is the risk of GPL making it into codebases by accident, but really only if you spend zero effort keeping track of it. There are companies like Black Duck that provide tools to scan a codebase for known open source code, and honestly a quick grep should often be sufficient as well. In VMware's case, I'm not sure about the executable loading or kernel module issues, but if "vmkernel" itself has code copied and pasted from Linux, as is alleged - well, they should have known better! No need for the largest software effort since Y2K when you could just ensure someone in the company understands the GPL and how it relates to the company's code, before said code is highly developed.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#205

Post by elktea » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:29 AM 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?

My company has been using XenServer for years now, we find it to be an excellent product.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#206

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:32 AM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #189

paulhauggis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I don't use any GNU code in any of my projects. I am just sick of people claiming it is "free" when it's actually a lure to get companies to use the code for free and then get bitten in the ass in the end by having to release proprietary code. Why is it that whenever I bring up this point, the words "theft" and "stealing" are used by many. However, when we are talking about copyright infringement,…

GNU licenses don't exist to be "lures". They exist to make it difficult to be parasitic to the open source world. Stallman isn't out to destroy commercial software. He's out to ensure freedom of computing for all. If commercial software can't function without taking away freedom, then that's the problem of those business models.

Eh, what? Because 'free software with commercial support offering' is not 'commercial software.

Your claim is "Stallman isn't out to destroy commercial software. If commercial software can't function without being free, then that's its problem" - where one is the very exact opposite of the other. "He doesn't want to kill it. But if it can't survive without being something it's inherently the opposite of, well, that's not us seeking its death, but rather 'a problem of their business model'." Hmm.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#207

Post by nightcracker » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:36 AM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #183

s73v3r wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like their conditions for using it, then don't fucking use it. Why do you feel entitled to use other people's work without adhering to their conditions?

This is exactly why I don't use any GNU code in any of my projects. I am just sick of people claiming it is "free" when it's actually a lure to get companies to use the code for free and then get bitten in the ass in the end by having to release proprietary code. Why is it that whenever I bring up this point, the words "theft" and "stealing" are used by many. However, when we are talking about copyright infringement,…

Stallman's ideology is that all software is open and modifiable by users. A viral license like GPL is best at accomplishing that. It gives full freedom to those adhering to the ideal, and locks out opponents of it.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#208

Post by rosser » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:39 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #188

tbrownaw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMWare is insane to continue violating it after being informed Or maybe, they don't agree that they are?

So, i actually don't think that's the case. This seems more a case of "they screwed up, and as a result got asked to open source something they need to, but business-wise think would be a huge monetary loss". So they are going to court because the worst that can happen is pretty much what they were already asked to do - open source vmkernel, etc. The copyright infringement money damages are probably minimal or nothin…

They have a great deal to lose. The consequences of being found to have violated the GPL include having your license to use GPL'ed code revoked.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#209

Post by mrsteveman1 » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 1:00 AM UTC

hga wrote: post #111

mrsteveman1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the remaining Linux parts mostly exist as hardware drivers, and VMware is providing the core kernel routines like scheduling and memory management and "world" management (equivalent to process management, but it's a hypervisor). That description of vmkernel reminds me of Xen's hypervisor (dom0 handling hardware access, providing drivers but otherwise still sitting "above" the hypervisor), one technical diff…

I don't think so. Xen is a Type 1 "bare metal" hypervisor, perhaps like ESXi, this is about a Type 2 hypervisor like Virtual Box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor#Classification . Proper Type 1 hypervisors run on top of the bare metal, boot first, and then in the case of Xen load a privileged virtual machine as Dom0 which has access to the bare hardware, which can be e.g. NetBSD in addition to Linux. Dom0's d…

This case does seem to be about ESXi though.

My read of what they've been doing as their "enterprise" hypervisor evolves (it's hard for me to keep track anymore) is that they went from the old ESX bootstrapping vmkernel using Linux and a kernel module (as I was vaguely recalling in my other post), to ESXi loading vmkernel directly, and in the process of moving to this new Type-1 architecture they decided to just lump a bunch of GPL'd code from the Linux kernel in to vmkernel.

I'll be interested to see more about how this thing actually works at runtime, legal issues aside. It's quite fascinating :)

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#210

Post by codys » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 1:02 AM 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…

> At this point they will release the busybox sources, potentially including the in-house version, but not under GPL

Do you mean they'll release the busybox sources potentially not under GPL, or the in-house version potentially not under GPL?

The former is probably legally difficult, while the latter is expected.

What isn't clear to me is how action regarding the use of copyrighted materials taken after a legal claim is made could have an effect on on-going proceedings.

Perhaps someone with more legal knowledge could elaborate?