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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

sfconservancy.org

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Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#22

Post by geoka9 »

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 wonder if sfconservancy (or any other free software group) be able to benefit if vmware is fined? Who'll get the money?

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#23

Post by jra_samba »

tw04 wrote: post #15
jra_samba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not the web master, I'll ping him.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#24

Post by jallmann »

detaro wrote: post #10
geofft wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From the wording in the link it sounds like they include modified GPL code and don't publish that, not that they are expected to open-source ESXi (or whatever it is called right now) entirely: > In 2011, Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide nor offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products (as required by BusyBox's license, GPLv2).

The article is bit muddled in describing the nature of the charges; it seems like there are multiple GPL violations. Withholding the source to BusyBox is one of them, in addition to the violations involving the Linux kernel.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#26

Post by higherpurpose »

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?

Oracle's Virtualbox? Oh, you said ethics...nevermind.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#28

Post by wongarsu »

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.

>clarify the legality of the GPL

So far the decision of German courts has been that if GPL wouldn't be a legal license, then the licensee wouldn't have had any rights at all (since you would default back to regular copyright).

It's possible that some points of the GPL will be debated, but I doubt that this will bring much additional clarity.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#29

Post by nitrogen »

cjbprime wrote: post #16
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

#30

Post by miles »

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.

Can you guys please add some more donation options like Amazon Payments or Bitcoin?
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