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

How to help !

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

To donate funds to Conservancy GPL compliance efforts see here:

http://sfconservancy.org/linux...

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

[loosescrews]

They are not using the entire linux kernel. At this point most of vmkernel is their own code and they are (for the most part) only linking in the parts of the linux kernel that deal with hardware. Linux has way better hardware support than BSD.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[Tom]

They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[pseudofrog]

I'll never get why the GPL is considered controversial with regard to its legality. Litigation should basically be:

It this your code?
No.
Why are you distributing this code?
We have a license.
What are the conditions of the license?
...

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

[zarthrag]

If that was the case VMware would (or should) have apologized, and removed the offending code to get into compliance. The fact that things are this far along signals at least some degree of maliciousness towards the terms of the GPL.

Hopefully, the penalty doesn't come out to be a meaningless fine. Instead, it should be a meaningless fine and forced compliance to the GPL - not through removal of the offending code (they have passed on that), but through open-sourcing of the entire product via GPLv2, effective immediately.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[jedidiah]

It's only "controversial" in software where people think that "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" is an acceptable way to think about other people's work.

The GPL is a clever hack of copyright law written by someone that knew what he was doing. I think people see RMS and think they can get away with sh*t because they think he's not smart enough to hire a real lawyer.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[mysidia]

You are mistaken in thinking they use the Linux kernel in ESXi. There is no Linux kernel anywhere in ESXi.

They have written their own operating system from scratch, and they did a complete rewrite of the kernel in the update from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0.

What they have done is copied a subset the interface API from the Linux kernel. Much how like the Wine Project has copied API details from Win32 without permission from Microsoft.

This allows existing driver source code that already works in Linux to be compiled using the VMware driver development kit into a binary that can be loaded as a driver in ESXi.

This means that hardware vendors can write the driver once, and then it could be built for either Linux or ESXi, so that seems beneficial for Linux users to have more drivers still being written for Linux.

This is considered a legacy framework, and VMware is already phasing this out... see details on the new native driver framework

This will be sad, as the native driver framework is proprietary, and it will likely no longer be possible to write your own drivers for ESXi, once vmklinux is gone, without purchasing the driver development tools at high $$$.

Also, major enterprises are running ESXi on much of their hardware, so the incentive may go away for many manufacturers to release information or develop Linux drivers; they can just produce their binary ESXi drivers and be done with it.

Re:I'm dying of curiousity

[Paul Jakma]

My understanding is that your description is inaccurate.

Yes, they have implemented a number of Linux APIs in their own code. Additionally, they have sucked in bits of GPL Linux code that implemented bits of those APIs (i.e. NOT reimplemented, as WINE does). This is to allow ESXi to be able to re-use drivers from Linux, as you say. However, they didn't stop there, from what I understand. They also have ESXi use Linux GPL drivers.

My understanding, from what I've read, is that ESXi didn't just re-implement Linux APIs. ESXi also heavily depends on GPL licensed Linux code, both in the partial-reimplementation of Linux APIs, and in sucking in Linux GPL drivers. The issue is this direct re-use of GPL code, and ESXi's heavy dependence on that GPL code. That dependence likely makes ESXi a derived work of the Linux GPL code, and as such it - in its *entirety* - must be distributed in accordance with the GPL.

Alternatively, VMWare are quite free to not use code they didn't write and don't own, if they don't like the licence conditions.

This is very different from what WINE does, and to characterise the situation as like WINE seems to be quite inaccurate.

Interpreting these conditions

[tepples]

The controversial part, as I understand it, is the difference in interpretation of a license's conditions. For example, the difference between an "aggregation" and a "combined work" in the GPLv2 confused at least one Slashdot user.

Re:Silly people

[Mikawo]

After skimming the GPLv2, found under section 3:

For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

Seems like it includes building and installation to me.

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:More than curious,

[pak9rabid]

The answer to this should have been obvious 8 years ago when they:

1. Made their management tools run on only Windows, shitting on the Linux community
2. Deprecated VMWare Server 1.x (free and very functional) for VMWare Server 2 (free and barely functional)

There are far better free alternatives out there nowadays if you're not managing a full-blown cloud infrastructure (see: LXC and KVM). And if you are, there's OpenStack.