Slashdot Mirror
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
To donate funds to Conservancy GPL compliance efforts see here:
http://sfconservancy.org/linux...
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.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
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.