VMware engineer here. This should not be construed as commenting on an ongoing court case (and I've never worked on the vmkernel), but I would like to respond to:
At least in my organization: Legal is definitely aware of the GPL. Engineers are definitely aware of the GPL. Adding a dependency on a GPL'd library requires an almost unbelievable amount of paperwork.
Again, at least in my organization: We also take open source obligations very seriously. For each release, we publish a detailed list of all open source software we consumed and a bundle containing all of the source code for those components, even if the project's license is one of the more permissive ones which doesn't require it.
I can't imagine a less open-source friendly system...
It doesn't require a snail mail letter as far as I can tell.
Swapping out Linux in vmkernel would be much harder.
See their FAQ (or one of the other comment threads here) for more info: http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq...
> It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar
It should register.
> Similarly any concerns raised by engineering are never taken seriously by the legal council.
Not in any serious company to my experience. Being so lax on legal matters for such company shows very low level of their management's professionalism.
Companies violate patents licenses agreements and all other legal nonsense all the time, that's what they got lawyers for.
Actually, no, it doesn't.
It merely means that the management views GPL violations as a low-probability calculated risk. As in "we know that we can be in compliance, but we won't be wasting any resources on it until it's justified". It has nothing to do with the professionalism.
It sounds like it has everything to do with professionalism.
No, that's a weird attitude (i.e. I'll create a mess today, next person will clean it tomorrow). One has to be responsible for the mess, and actually preventing it to begin with. What you described is exactly the lack of professionalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast
It's only unprofessional if you're bad at it.
I get what you're saying, and I agree absolutely that it is a morally reprehensible thing to lie, cheat, or take the short-term approach to long-term problems. At the same time, you have to realize that anthropomorphizing companies is wrong. They are entities created to obtain profits, and any other reasoning about them is just going to cause you grief and distress. Accept that the system is made to generate non-corporeal profit-seeking amoral sociopaths, and move the fuck on.
No. It's a fake logic often used to excuse of kind of crooked behavior. This doesn't fly. Crooks are crooks, whether they are a company or not. Companies have those who drive them. If those people at the head can't control their own companies not to be crooks - too bad for them, they bear the responsibility.
Which shows stupidity of that management, which thinks that legal violations are acceptable as long as they can view them as "low risk". Or it simply means it's a company of crooks. Either one is not a professional environment.
Any engineer competent enough to incorporate Busybox into another product would know what GPL is, and what are the most basic implications that it leads to. I find it much easier to believe that VMWare as a whole was explicitly aware of the licensing situation. It remains to be seen what was their plan B, if there ever was one.
Do you mean they'll release the busybox sources potentially not under GPL, or the in-house version potentially not under GPL?
The former is probably legally difficult, while the latter is expected.
What isn't clear to me is how action regarding the use of copyrighted materials taken after a legal claim is made could have an effect on on-going proceedings.
Perhaps someone with more legal knowledge could elaborate?
This is a software company, not a chocolate factory. "Doesn't even register" isn't an accident, it's a choice in the same way ignoring the speed limit is a choice.
Then everyone in their legal department needs to be fired yesterday.
There's no legal department of any note in Silicon Valley which isn't painfully aware of the GPL, nor has there been for the past 15 years, if not 25. They may have decided, as he somewhat more plausibly suggests, that the risks aren't significant. FSF have pursued GPL compliance cases in the past, and their goals are to increase the scope of Free Software -- getting either larger works released as open source or changes committed back. IIRC some major GCC enhancements came by way of this route.
Odds of seeking a cash settlement or other punitive award are slight. There's similarly little risk of customers being sued, though other VMWare partners could conceivably be. This doesn't do much for corporate goodwill in at least some quarters, and a lot of early GNU / Free Software folks are now in senior positions within the industry.
I worked for a company that was on a receiving end of a similar GPL legal action (though not busybox-based and not from SF Conservancy). I'll tell you what will happen next. VMWare will (a) write a drop-in in-house replacement for busybox (b) they will show that busybox is not an principal part for ESXi and that it can be easily swapped for the in-house replacement. At this point they will release the busybox sources, potentially including the in-house version, but not under GPL. This will hinder the lawsuit, but it will keep dragging on until everyone gets tired of its pointlessness and then it will get quietly dismissed to the mutual satisfaction of both involved parties.
The thing is that it's not that VMWare is evil or unethical. It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar, so it never percolates down to engineering. Similarly any concerns raised by engineering are never taken seriously by the legal council. It's really as simple as that.