Software Freedom Conservancy Funds GPL Suit Against VMWare

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes with this excerpt from a news release from the Software Freedom Conservancy: Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2, the license of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware's ESXi products. Serge Wroclawski points out the SFC's technical FAQ about the suit. One nugget: This case is specifically regarding a combined work that VMware allegedly created by combining their own code (“vmkernel”) with portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2. As such, this, to our knowledge, marks the first time an enforcement case is exclusively focused on this type of legal question relating to GPL

Comments

I'm dying of curiousity

[idontgno]

about VMWare's position on this. What on earth do they think trumps their obligations to the license they agreed to by using GPLv2 software in their product?

I wonder if they could possibly be as deluded and stubborn as SCO.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[lolcutusofbong]

They probably figured they'd never get caught by anyone with the balls and money to take them to court. I'd love to see all of ESXi and vSphere get open sourced as the result of this lawsuit, but I suspect that's just a pipe dream.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[Richard_at_work]

If, and thats a big if, VMWare have done anything in violation of the license at all - the "technical FAQ" is very light indeed on actual technical details, instead mostly talking about how Conservancy went to great lengths to do anything they could to open a dialog before suing. The "technical" part of the FAQ is a single diagram which explains very little in how they think VMWares approach is violating either the GPL or copyright.

This is going to be something to watch, as its going to be an interesting one.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[gstoddart]

They're a for-profit corporation, who see this as their bread and butter technology.

All you need is an idiot CEO to say "I want this" and an asshole lawyer to agree with him.

Are you honestly expecting principle, logic, and honesty from this?

It's a corporation looking out for its own interests. If that means fucking everybody else over or coming up with your own interpretation of the law? So be it.

I expect nothing less from this kind of situation.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[bill_mcgonigle]

it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

It sure is, and the people making such decisions face no consequences for violating the license. Yeah, maybe the corporation will get slapped with a tiny fine that reflects some small percentage of the money saved by incorporating the GPL'ed library, but how is that really any disincentive? It's more of an inconvenience, or simply a cost that gets processed through the EMC legal department, and then only maybe.

The money being spent on the prosecution won't actually change much behavior - there might be better causes to donate your money too (especially if you don't believe in imaginary property) than funding this expedition to behead a hydra.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[lgw]

I highly doubt there was any such forethought. Much more likely (at least, at companies I've worked at) that some junior dev checked in GPL code as his own work, and it somehow slipped past code review (as can happen at crunch time).

I worked for "shrinkwrap software" companies for `15 years, and all of them had ironclad rules against using GPL software in any way (without a multi-month lawyer-approval process anyhow). One place I worked ran open source detection tools (similar to the plagiarism detection tools, but seeded with all the big free projects) as part of the daily build, they were so paranoid. I'd be surprised if this was deliberate on VMware's part. But then, maybe they're just a shitty company now?

That will be the interesting part of this case, IMO: was this deliberate, against official policy that the dev teams ignored, or some junior guy cheating?

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[dottrap]

That is, unless VMWare sincerely thinks they are in the right and have a defensible case. Then things get very interesting because then there is a chance the GPL could be undermined/weakened if they win and you will see a lot of groups start paying attention to make sure Software Freedom Conservancy doesn't screw up the case for GPL. (And you may see other parties interested in exploiting a weakened GPL.)

Here's a suggestion for a verdict

[Opportunist]

Anyone found in willful and deliberate violation of the GPL showed that they have no interest in copyright or its protection. Hence they implicitly and irrevocably agree that they will not pursue anyone violating their copyright.

That should take care of this pretty quickly. You don't even have to look for GPL violations in products anymore, corporations will do that for you in the products of their competitor, hoping to kick them out of the market that way.

Re:Interpreting these conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

To take that a step further, the GPL is largely untested in court.

Mostly because every violator's lawyers have looked at it and said "Give up. There's no way we can win this in a court case. This thing is ironclad."

Re:GPL is about control, not freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Without developers there would be NO end users. Developer freedom should be the #1 concern for everyone in the industry and the GPL should be shunned. This lawsuit only goes to prove that GPL advocates are far more interested in hurting companies than writing software and this developer is sick of it, I refuse to use any GPL'd software, and hjave totally stopped even porting my code to Lin-sux. It's all OS X and FreeBSD from here on out. BSD is the only platform that guarantees freedom. Period.