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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

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Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#11

Post by jra_samba »

emacsen wrote: post #6
tw04 wrote: post #4

I'm surprised it took this long. I can't really blame them, after 15 years of ignoring the GPL, they probably figured nobody would ever come up with the financial resources to actually go after them. This is going to take years to come to a resolution and millions and millions of dollars in lawyers fees.

I agree. If you want to help the little guy here, then pleased donate to fund the lawsuit: http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-app...

Please help ! There's currently a $50k challenge match going on so anything you donate will be doubled.

Disclaimer - I'm on the Board of Directors of Conservancy.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#12

Post by emacsen »

geofft wrote: post #7
jallmann wrote: post #2

Is there any information about why VMware thinks they are not bound by the GPL? Curious whether they have a technical justification, rather than simply being a blatant licensing violation.

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…

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 these distinctions.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#14

Post by stephengillie »

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?

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#15

Post by tw04 »

jra_samba wrote: post #11
emacsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. If you want to help the little guy here, then pleased donate to fund the lawsuit: http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-app...

Please help ! There's currently a $50k challenge match going on so anything you donate will be doubled. Disclaimer - I'm on the Board of Directors of Conservancy.

Your ticker doesn't appear to be updating? Maybe that's by design?

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#16

Post by cjbprime »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #9
filmgirlcw wrote: post #8

So this could be really interesting from a precedent standpoint because it could help clarify the legality of the GPL in various contexts in the court. Whatever you think about the GPL (and I'm for open source and open licenses but I do have issues with GPL v3, but that's just me), this has been necessary, I believe, in order for GPL and OSS projects to move forward.

I'm not sure it will be that groundbreaking; this seems to be yet another busybox violation litigated in Germany, of which we have had several already.

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 independent code can stay proprietary because it's not a derived work of Linux". I don't think this position is correct, but I can see that it at least requires a court case to adjudicate.

But in VMWare's case, it appears that they took the Linux kernel and modified it to make their own vmkernel. I can't see how you make an argument (that their vmkernel is not a derived work of Linux) that takes more than ten seconds to soundly defeat.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#17

Post by filmgirlcw »

notacoward wrote: post #5
jallmann wrote: post #2

Is there any information about why VMware thinks they are not bound by the GPL? Curious whether they have a technical justification, rather than simply being a blatant licensing violation.

Don't know specifically, but these usually come down to hair-splitting over terms like "linking" and "derived work" and so on. I guess VMware think they can convince a judge that the way their code interacts with the Linux kernel does not cause it to fall under the GPL's source-publication requirement. On the other hand, I know Christoph enough to know how insanely smart and persistent he is. If he's confident enough…

And frankly, some of the hair-splitting differentiators need to be settled in court. It seems more obvious in compiled software (such as what VMWare is doing and with BusyBox), but if you think about the persistent issues that arise with what is the difference between "derived works" and "linked works" with web apps (even before JavaScript started taking over the client and server side), there are a lot of questions that I have long believed only a court could really settle to at least give a legal precedent.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#18

Post by filmgirlcw »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #9
filmgirlcw wrote: post #8

So this could be really interesting from a precedent standpoint because it could help clarify the legality of the GPL in various contexts in the court. Whatever you think about the GPL (and I'm for open source and open licenses but I do have issues with GPL v3, but that's just me), this has been necessary, I believe, in order for GPL and OSS projects to move forward.

I'm not sure it will be that groundbreaking; this seems to be yet another busybox violation litigated in Germany, of which we have had several already.

like cjbprime said, looking at the case, this has the potential to be much bigger.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#19

Post by tw04 »

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?

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.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#20

Post by ghaff »

geofft wrote: post #7
jallmann wrote: post #2

Is there any information about why VMware thinks they are not bound by the GPL? Curious whether they have a technical justification, rather than simply being a blatant licensing violation.

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.)
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