VMware alleged to have violated Linux’s open source license for years

[silicon_toad2000]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/vmware-alleged-to-have-violated-linuxs-open-source-license-for-years/

Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig filed the suit in the district court of Hamburg, Germany with funding from the nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy, which works to "promote, improve, develop, and defend" free and open source software. The case centers on "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," the group said in an FAQ describing the lawsuit.

VMware denies the lawsuit's accusations, calling them "without merit," but it did not address them specifically in its public statement on the matter. The ESXi hypervisor is a key part of VMware's leading position in the enterprise virtualization market. VMware, which is owned by EMC, made $1.7 billion in revenue and $326 million in net income in the most recent quarter.

Hellwig is one of the most active developers of the Linux kernel. He "has publicly denounced VMware's misuse of GPL-licensed code since 2007," the Software Freedom Conservancy said in its announcement yesterday. "In 2011, Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide nor offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products (as required by BusyBox's license, GPLv2)."

[Pri]

Having used the ESXi hypervisor for years through their vSphere product I would agree with Chris that they have violated the license. They make changes to the Linux kernel for their hypervisor and only ship the resulting work as binaries. They violate the license by not also supplying their code alterations in source form.

It's pretty open and shut in my opinion. You cannot ship compiled code licensed under the GPLv2. A similar situation has arisen in the Minecraft community and the workaround created there by the community has been to have the GPLv2 source code downloaded locally and then compiled with non-GPLv2 code on the customer/client side. So instead of distributing the end product you instead distribute a build tool which downloads the open source components and the closed sourced components and builds the binary, thus bypassing the GPLv2's distribution clauses when mixing differently licensed code.

I expect if VMWare loses this case they'll just do something similar. Set up their own code repository that lists their closed source code then have a builder tool that downloads the GPLv2 open source code then compiles them together.