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VMware May Violate Linux Copyrights
Nailer writes "Bloomberg believe VMware's IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company's supposedly proprietary ESX product, as top 10 Linux contributor Christopher Hellwig claims the software may violate Linux kernel copyrights. 'Is Hellwig right, and is VMware a derived product of Linux? Unless vmkernel can be loaded without the Linux kernel, it would appear so. VMware was developed from another, long ago OS created as a research project, but it's unclear whether vmkernel was ported from that OS or rewritten as the Linux-requiring binary blob. What's more of an issue is that VMware had these serious questions posed directly to them a year ago, repeated in a public forum many times since, but have yet to respond at all.'"
ESX runs directly on the hardware. They're saying ESX is what's violating the copyrights.
When does this happen in the movie?
Because ESX server (the specific product in question here) runs differently than the Windows and Linux Workstation products (the key word being "hypervisor"):
"[The] VMware ESX hypervisor virtualization approach provides lower overhead and better control and granularity for allocating resources (CPU-time, disk-bandwidth, network-bandwidth, memory-utilization) to virtual machines. It also increases security, thus positioning VMware ESX as an enterprise-grade product." - Wikipedia
Whereas the desktop products operate over the OS layer, ESX is closer to the bare hardware (Type 1 versus Type 2 hypervisor - Read more. The question in this case is why it needs the Linux kernel "loader" if it is a self-contained kernel. My understanding of the product isn't deep enough to speculate.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Strange that during a training session the instructor consistently referred to the underlying platform as a highly modified RedHat. They didn't even try to claim that this was anything else, or even just their own Linux, they used the brand name of the starting point.
"So according to VMware ESX actually has two kernels - the vmkernel, and a Linux kernel. This sounds a bit odd, given a computer can only run one kernel at a given time otherwise which one determines who gets access to the CPU, memory, and other hardware?"
Uhh, this is a virtualization system. The ESX kernel provides a hardware abstraction layer which the linux kernel in the service console can access.
So yes, it IS running two kernels, the ESX kernel which has priority, and the linux kernel running on top of it in a VM like every other virtualized kernel, once it gets running. Duh.
But the meat of the FA seems to be that "Because a Linux kernel is used to initiate the ESX kernel, and because the linux kernel has a binary blob driver to help in the bootstrap process, QED ESX kernel is considered a derivitive work, because Linus says that things which require kernel changes are derivitive works" WTF?
FUD is bad. No matter the source.
The Linux kernel allows binary blobs. VMWare uses an F@#)(* huge binary blob to bootstrap ESX and other stuff. OOOHHH SCARY bogeyman violate GPL. Either sue (Linus does have standing. The SCSI author actually does have standing if it includes his code anywhere in the hacked up kernel) or get off the pot.
And Just say no to FUD.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Lots of proprietary software runs just fine on Linux, including drivers, without violating the GPL. VMWare's ESX Server is sort of a special case as people seem to think a part of the product is itself derived from Linux. "Derived from Linux" is not the same as "running on Linux".
What details were omitted from TFA, in your opinion?
From wikipedia: So, as you see, the GPL is clearly not viral. All it says is that you make derivative works with GPL works and distribute those works, you have to GPL them too, thus respecting the rights of the person who owns the code you are redistributing. You get the same thing with "closed" products too: you purchase a license to redistribute something, but the actual product you are redistributing has to stay closed.
Furthermore, you can run all kinds of closed source stuff on a GPL system. Very many websites are run on apache and very few of them are GFDL, for example. Vbulletin and CXOffice are good software examples. TiVo is another one, as much as it vexes us all. Closed source can come into contact with open source all day long without "contracting" the GPL.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I moderated a panel at a conference about a year ago where one of the participants was Jack Lo, VMware's senior director of R&D, and I made the comment that I had understood that VMware ESX Server was based on a modified Linux kernel. He interrupted me and said that this was a common misconception, but that it was not the case. We didn't get into more details.
Breakfast served all day!
No, you're missing the point. Linux is loaded first, then a closed source module, which loads a closed source OS. The closed source module is a derived work of linux.
But they don't use kexec. They use a closed source module.
Arguments should be evaluated on their merits, not on who makes them.
Did you miss the part about the closed source module? There is no public interface. This isn't kexec. VMware are distributing the kernel and a closed source module together. Can you name another company that does that?
Then you had a poor-quality instructor. Every VMware instructor I've had has been crystal clear that the Service Console runs a heavily modified version Red Hat, but that the vmkernel - the OS that's bootloaded by the SC, which handles virtualization and hardware access, or in other words the underlying platform - is a completely proprietary OS.
VMWare licenses the Implimentation of Linux used in ESX from Red Hat, however nowhere is that mentioned in the Article.
Red Hat are not the copyright holders of (all of) Linux. They cannot license Linux under any terms other than the GPL.
That's not surprising at all. You're interacting with the service console, which runs Linux. It's more interesting to me that your Nagios box thinks the SC is running 2.6.8. And Debian, at that. The Service Console for ESX 3 actually runs a heavily modified RHEL 3 - 2.4.21 as of 3.0.1. ESX 2.5 ran Red Hat 9, I believe.
You're overstating the GPL's claimed definition. GPLv2 simply references copyright law's definition of derived works; only GPLv3 specifically references shared-library linkages as inferring derivative status, and even then only when the 3rd-party code is written to the interface provided by the GPLed code ("shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require", such that use of a common, standardized interface not specific to some GPLed work is explicitly acceptable).
Except that in this case the shim is much smaller, probably about the size of your average home router kernel. ESX lite supposedly doesn't have a console because of this, and it should be pretty easy to see what, if any, of the bootloader sticks around.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Hmmm... boy it didn't take me 3 seconds on a search engine to find this or anything (stupid posts from people who couldn't take a single second to think annoy me)
m l
http://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html
Heck the ESX EULA, gives you a nice hyperlink to the downloads even
http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/esx_server.ht
umm, no. You're actually ssh'ing into the service console, which runs Red Hat Linux. "uname -a" just shows the Linux kernel version that the service console is running, not the ESX kernel. The service console just provides a means of interacting with ESX, but it's not ESX itself.
Actually, TiVo is under the GPL. It has to be because they've modified the kernel and such. That's the main reason why so many people are up in arms over it.
the "directly on hardware" is marketing talk saying that you dont need and shouldnt even bother with the host OS, vmware takes care of it (installation, support, updates, etc)
No, actually, it doesn't mean that at all. You have no actual concept of how ESX works, you just SSH'd into a box, ran uname and considered yourself clever. What you are looking at is the Service Console. The SC runs a modified RHEL 3, and functions on bootup as a bootloader for the vmkernel. Once the vmkernel is loaded, the vmkernel handles all hardware access and virtualization functions, and is a completely separate OS from the service console. The Service Console continues running as a pseudo-VM with API hooks into the vmkernel to preform management functions. It bridges the vmkernel with the outside world. The vmkernel itself, the underlying OS running everything and managing hardware access, is proprietary, and is not Linux.
Might I suggest you take some VMware classes to gain a better understanding of how this stuff works.
I am a former VMware programmer. Obviously I do not speak for the company, just myself.
VMware is not infringing anything. First, they have high standards of ethics. Even if they didn't, they would be too smart for that. When ESX was designed, there were other choices for the console OS, FreeBSD for instance. But they figured out that using Linux was legal and did so. Both VMware and Linux benefit from this. Yes, it is not a "standard", well-understood relationship such as running some app on top of the kernel. But it respects the technical aspects of the license and I believe its spirit as well (although my interpretation of the "spirit" may differ from yours).
One could argue that Linux benefits more from VMware than the other way around. In many cases VMware ESX introduced Linux to corporate data centers that wanted nothing to do with it. The sales people had to work hard to convince potential customers that the product was NOT running on Linux, that Linux was just running in a separate VM to help along with various tasks.
Linux is also helped by the fact that virtual machines offer a low-cost way of experimenting with new systems, and add a layer of freedom in the conservative corporate IT environment.
As to whether VMware should be free software, there are situations for which free software is just not the right model and VMware is a good example. In the early years of the company, someone tried to start a competing free-software product (at some point called Freemware) but it didn't go far. VMware is a large (huge) system. It took a lot of unglamorous work from a lot of people under the same roof to bring it to life. It was almost a miracle that it would run. It stressed CPUs in truly novel ways. (The programmers hit and had to work around previously unknown bugs in the CPU.) I, the eternal pessimist, feared that we'd never be able to make it stable enough for a viable product. Fortunately I was wrong, and in any case Windows was a lot less stable than VMware those days, so it didn't matter that much.
Luigi
The spirit of the GPL is meant to discourage closed source anything. Businesses SHOULD stay away from it unless they have a plan for profiting off of their own open source code.
If you distribute your code, you're not even allowed to link to GPL libraries without your code falling under the GPL.
There is plenty of great BSD/LGPL/MIT/etc licensed code out there which is much less of a legal nightmare.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.