VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation

Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation by nailer on Friday March 06, 2015 @01:36AM (#9155881)

Re: [1] There's an argument that ESXi was released to handle these concerns, which predate ESXi's release. I ran venturecake which first published the story, showing how the Linux kernel started vmkernel, not the other way around. Proprietary kernel modules are considered derived works unless they can run independently (eg, nvidia.ko isn't generally considered to be a derived work because it's largely code ported from other platforms). However retrospectively making something portable doesn't change it's previous status as a derived work, and ESXi wouldn't be popular without ESX, which wouldn't exist without Linux booting vmware (despite vmware's protestation otherwise - load ESX and watch the boot process).

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Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation by makomk on Friday March 06, 2015 @05:33AM (#9156441)

I dunno, a bootloader seems like the most clear-cut example of something not being a derived work you could get - it doesn't care about the code being bootloeaded and vice-versa, and the API between the two is about as trivial as it can get. What matters according to the GPL isn't whether the code runs on other platforms but how deeply intertwined it is with the kernel; for most Linux drivers, whether it runs on other platforms is a good rule of thumb for determining this, but it kind of breaks down for ESX.

Also, "retrospectively making something portable doesn't change it's previous status as a derived work" was if I'm not mistaken SCO's argument for why it should be illegal for customers to run software they'd developed on SCO Unix under Linux. It's not something we should be supporting because it'd a really dangerous tool for locking users into a particular OS. (Fortunately, SCO lost.)

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Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation by nailer on Saturday March 07, 2015 @06:10AM (#9161582)

There is no boot loader. This is the Linux kernel module interface. The boot loader used on ESX was an actual boot loader, IIRC grub.

Arguing kernel modules are derived works from the kernel is very very different from arguing user space software is derived from an OS.

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Re:VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation by xorcist on Saturday March 07, 2015 @01:18PM (#9162532)

> nvidia.ko isn't generally considered to be a derived work

That's far from clear. Many core developers (including Torvalds, IIRC, but correct me if I'm wrong) are on the record that they consider Nvidia to violate the spirit and/or the letter of the GPL there. It's just that nobody cares enough to litigate.

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