anonemployee

> It's just that this GPL thing doesn't even register on their legal radar, so it never percolates down to engineering.

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.