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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

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Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#291

Post by xorcist »

davidgerard wrote: post #289
xorcist wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best" is, as always, depending on what you need to do. I'm seeing much better direct device I/O on KVM than on ESXi (which is saying a lot actually, since raw I/O is a bit tricky on the latter).

That is useful information, thank you :-)

It's quite a difference too, above 10%. This is on raw device pass through however, which is not very useful to most people. As soon as you are on a file system things change considerably (pretty much the other way around, on my workload).

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#292

Post by hugoroy »

DannyBee wrote: post #275
hugoroy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 6 does not say that at all. "Each time you redistribute the Program" In this sentence "You" would be VMWare, not the authors of Linux. "the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy" the Linux license is between Linux authors and recipients of VMWare software . So section 6 does not say Vmware gets a new license each time they get a copy of Linux. Section 6 just makes sure…

Uh, you is whoever they get the program from. It says that. That's what 'each time you redistribute means". It means if i redistribute to someone, this is what happens. Recipient is whoever i redistribute to. So if redhat redistributes (through their website) to vmware, redhat is you, and vmware is recipient. You don't get to pin You to be a specific person just because it comes out the way you like it. The license s…

> "you is whoever they get the program from"

That's not how it works. "You" is, consistently throughout the GPL, whoever gets the program under the GPL license, and that license is between "You" and the copyright holders on the program (i.e. the licensors).

The person who is "you" can, in another situation, be a licensor or mere redistributor, but that's irrelevant to the legal relationship at stake here (i.e the relationship between the copyright holders and a person who failed to comply with the GPL).

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#293

Post by hugoroy »

DannyBee wrote: post #270
hugoroy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making this "loophole" up. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156539

No, i'm not. Shocking: heavy GNU contributor doesn't like this viewpoint :)

full disclosure: I have exactly 0 copyright in GNU software.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#294

Post by hugoroy »

tptacek wrote: post #287
hugoroy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making this "loophole" up. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156539

Interesting. Is that an argument you've seen confirmed by a lawyer, or are you yourself actually a open-source software licensing lawyer, like 'DannyBee is?

Yes, I am a lawyer.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#295

Post by stephengillie »

redbeard0x0a wrote: post #190
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?

You might want to consider Joyent's Smart Data Center. It is all opensource and you can buy support. A lot of the people leaving the engineering teams at Sun/Oracle ended up at Joyent. I think datacenter platforms will start to look more like "Cloud Hosting" and less like it currently does where we basically just slice up a server into many different servers. https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://github.com/jo…

Sorry for the tangent, but I keep confusing them with Joylent, the Soylent alternative. It's almost a Marketing Namespace Collision.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#296

Post by snuxoll »

rodgerd wrote: post #95
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?

> I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space Grab the oVirt upstream and decide which of the commercially-supported downstreams you want.

RHEV is a pretty nice product, and the licensing is a lot less costly than VMWare. $999/yr per socket pair.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#297

Post by snuxoll »

geofft wrote: post #49
emacsen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that there's linking, not merely calling from. As for "what came first"- the license (which is a legal contract) specifies what is and isn't allowed. The LGPL would work in the way you are saying that VMWare might like it to work- where linking isn't the same as deriving. The fact that these two licenses exist demonstrates that distinction clearly. The issue will be whether or not a judge understands the…

"Linking" isn't really a legal term either; it doesn't occur either in copyright law (of course), nor does it occur in the text of the GPLv2. It's true that in non-legally-binding prose, the FSF describes the GPLv2 as prohibiting linking with proprietary apps, but the license itself doesn't draw that line. The FSF may have intended to draw that distinction with the LGPL, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's th…

> On the flip side, if you sell a virtual appliance that includes the GNU userspace (GPL) and some proprietary binaries, is that considered distribution "as part of a whole" (the appliance), and are you obligated to make your code available under the GPL? Even though there's no linking involved, it's not clear to me whether your code can be "reasonably considered independent and separate" if it's only distributed as part of the appliance.

There is already legal precedent separating software licenses at process boundaries. This is why every piece of software in a Linux distribution doesn't need to be GPL'ed.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#298

Post by snuxoll »

geofft wrote: post #100
froseph wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wayback machine* has Zachary Amsden's opinion in 2007 why the vmkernel (and other components) are not in violation of GPL. It's an interesting read. He concludes: > 1) There is no argument that depending on a Linux console OS makes any part of ESX subject to GPL that is not already opene sourced. We have open sourced those GPL components of the system which we have modified and given the changes back to the commu…

> 1) There is no argument that depending on a Linux console OS makes any part of ESX subject to GPL that is not already opene sourced. Yes there is: the GPLv2 says: "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate w…

There is already precedent for the separation of software licenses at process boundaries, if the GPL was viral enough to cause issues with virtual appliances then Linux distributions would be in deep water already since they are a product of the combined software included on the installation media.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#299

Post by snuxoll »

FireBeyond wrote: post #230
Kalium wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implicit is that I believe commercial software can exist while still being free.

How so? Commercial -support-, perhaps. Butt in not sure how offering to sell software that is free I'd any business model. And that's my point, Stallman absolutely DOES want to kill commercial software (as is this right)

If Stallman wanted to kill commercial software he would have put wording into the GPL to prevent its use in commercial products. As it stands I can still use the GPL on a commercial product, of course it is a rather odd choice since the user is free to take the work and redistribute it, which is why going the commercial support route is much more typical.
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