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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?
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.
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".
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).
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
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