Out of curiosity - if GPL is taken so seriously, why do customers have to jump through so many hoops to get copies of source. Last I checked you are required to send a letter via snailmail to legal counsel @vmware and if they deem you worthy, they send back physical media with copies of the source.
I can't imagine a less open-source friendly system...
If you want a copy of the source you can get it via the Open Source tab on most VMware products download page. You'll find the open source distributed for ESXi under the VMware vSphere Open Source group on this page -> https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_...
It doesn't require a snail mail letter as far as I can tell.
Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
by delinka on Thursday March 05, 2015 @09:38PM
(#9155277)
It's not required to be "friendly" nor is it required to be convenient for you. It's designed to be compliant, internally audit-able, and for free they get the ability to frustrate you into not requesting copies.
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.