3 ms·

ugh why vmware, I really like their products hope they make this right

• SwellJoe 11y ago
  They've been fighting for years to not make it right. I don't think there is any scenario in which one could say they have "made it right". VMware is a company that won't participate ethically with the Linux community, even when given ample opportunity to do so, and they should be shunned for that behavior. It's not even asking that much, honestly. The kernel components are a very small portion of the VMware stack, and are pretty clearly an extension of GPL code. The argument VMware is making would effectively destroy the GPL, if successful. Any company could fork a GPL project, build some extensions with some minor handwaving in the general direction of abstracting it out into "modules" and call it a non-derivative work. This isn't, from my understanding, merely a binary blob that gets loaded into any standard Linux kernel, as some proprietary Linux driver modules do; there's seems to be a steady state around this use case, where Linus and the community is reasonably comfortable with it (even though some other GPL projects take a harder line on this sort of extension). But, what VMware is shipping is a broken version of Linux (i.e. one that does not have the protections of the GPL for end users). The conversation with VMware has been going on for years, since it was first noticed they were non-compliant with the BusyBox license. VMware has always had no respect for the GPL. Which would be fine, if they stayed the fuck out of Linux. But, if they want to play in the Linux market, they need to play by the rules that the rest of the industry plays by.