8 ms·

VMWare violating the GPL license? No offence, but it's just mixing up FSF's PR with reality. Which is: VMWare can afford much better lawyers than FSF could, a

by trasz 8y ago

VMWare violating the GPL license? No offence, but it's just mixing up FSF's PR with reality. Which is: VMWare can afford much better lawyers than FSF could, and if there really was a violation, they wouldn't give the project a green light, given that alternatives (operating systems under less restrictive licenses) are freely available.

jononor 8y ago
By this logic no company that can afford good lawyers would violate any laws. That clearly is not the case, just look at VW diesel emissions scandal for instance.
- trasz 8y ago
  Okay, that's a good argument. But you cannot just assume a malice when there's much simpler explanation - and in this case there is.
  - jononor 8y ago
    Malice is not needed, it can be out of incompetence too.
ghaff 8y ago
It wasn't really just EFF PR, but it, for what it's worth (IANAL and this is just my opinion), rested on some very subtle points about which reasonable people disagreed. Here's something I wrote at the time: https://www.cnet.com/news/vmware-and-the-gpl-round-two/ https://www.cnet.com/news/vmware-and-the-gpl-round-two/
- trasz 8y ago
  Being reasonable person is one thing, understanding licensing issues is something completely different. The whole thing boils down to one thing: whether something becomes a "derivative work" just due to being linked with code licensed under GPL. FSF says it does - and one could assume they know what they are talking about; after all it's their own license, right? Except that the GPL license doesn't really say that; it's just FSF's interpretation. While e.g. the Mozilla license states very clearly what is and what is not covered by the license, thus avoiding the problem, the GPL is unclear. There is, however, one very simple way to win any lawsuit that would claim that your binary blob violates the GPL: just make sure it's possible for you to demonstrate in court that your code can run with something else instead of the GPL thingie. If someone sued, say, NVidia, for putting their binary drivers into people's GNU kernels, they can point at the FreeBSD version of their driver: if it works without Linux, it clearly doesn't constitute a derived code; Linux is just one of the platforms it works with.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    No real disagreement. Some combination of the license (and existence of the LGPL), other things the FSF has written, practice, and history suggest that somewhere between statically linking your program together with GPL programs and shipping your program on a disk alongside unrelated GPL programs, you go from having to comply with the GPL and not having to comply with the GPL (for your own code). However, much of the space between those two points is a matter of conjecture, legal theory, and opinion.

by trasz 8y ago

jononor 8y ago

By this logic no company that can afford good lawyers would violate any laws. That clearly is not the case, just look at VW diesel emissions scandal for instance.

trasz 8y ago
Okay, that's a good argument. But you cannot just assume a malice when there's much simpler explanation - and in this case there is.
- jononor 8y ago
  Malice is not needed, it can be out of incompetence too.

ghaff 8y ago

It wasn't really just EFF PR, but it, for what it's worth (IANAL and this is just my opinion), rested on some very subtle points about which reasonable people disagreed. Here's something I wrote at the time: https://www.cnet.com/news/vmware-and-the-gpl-round-two/ https://www.cnet.com/news/vmware-and-the-gpl-round-two/

trasz 8y ago
Being reasonable person is one thing, understanding licensing issues is something completely different. The whole thing boils down to one thing: whether something becomes a "derivative work" just due to being linked with code licensed under GPL. FSF says it does - and one could assume they know what they are talking about; after all it's their own license, right? Except that the GPL license doesn't really say that; it's just FSF's interpretation. While e.g. the Mozilla license states very clearly what is and what is not covered by the license, thus avoiding the problem, the GPL is unclear. There is, however, one very simple way to win any lawsuit that would claim that your binary blob violates the GPL: just make sure it's possible for you to demonstrate in court that your code can run with something else instead of the GPL thingie. If someone sued, say, NVidia, for putting their binary drivers into people's GNU kernels, they can point at the FreeBSD version of their driver: if it works without Linux, it clearly doesn't constitute a derived code; Linux is just one of the platforms it works with.
- ghaff 8y ago
  No real disagreement. Some combination of the license (and existence of the LGPL), other things the FSF has written, practice, and history suggest that somewhere between statically linking your program together with GPL programs and shipping your program on a disk alongside unrelated GPL programs, you go from having to comply with the GPL and not having to comply with the GPL (for your own code). However, much of the space between those two points is a matter of conjecture, legal theory, and opinion.