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Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX? Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen viol

Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX? Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.

technothrasher 4y ago
> Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX? If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).
- monocasa 4y ago
  It sounds like vmklinux is deprecated but still shipping for older drivers if I'm understanding their documentation. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-of-the-vmklinux-driver-stack-deprecation.html https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-... vSphere 6.7 (which they're still supporting and shipping updates to as it was only released last June), includes the vmklinux driver stack. For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor. It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.
rrdharan 4y ago
How do you propose banning this while permitting open source drivers for Windows? I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.
- monocasa 4y ago
  The key is in "derived from". Very few people would say NT is derived from some random drivers that nobody at Microsoft had a hand in writing. Taking existing code and having it form the foundation of a new kernel and claiming it as all closed source is quite a bit more obviously derived from that existing code open source code. "Derived from" is the core concept in the GPL; it actually doesn't use the word "link" at all. Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    I thought they ripped the network stack from BSD. https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stack-based-on-unix/ https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...
    - monocasa 4y ago
      That's fair, I should have kept constrainig my statements to GPLed code. That being said, Microsoft complied with all of the license terms of that stack (basically shipping a copyright notice and constraining themselves on how they advertise it's use). If it was a GPLed stack and they never published source, I'd be saying the same thing about them that I'm saying now about VMware.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    They did publish the source to the GPL drivers as well as to the vmklinux “adapter”, and I don’t believe either the core hypervisor or the ESX kernel were derived from or adapted from the Linux kernel. My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem. Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver SDK and hardware vendors wrote native drivers for it. To me this seems very similar to the way Linux had for a while a way to run Wifi drivers originally written for NT, though it didn’t lead to the year of the Linux desktop as some of us might have hoped for at the time.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago. The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.

Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX? Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.

technothrasher 4y ago

> Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX? If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).

monocasa 4y ago
It sounds like vmklinux is deprecated but still shipping for older drivers if I'm understanding their documentation. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-of-the-vmklinux-driver-stack-deprecation.html https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-... vSphere 6.7 (which they're still supporting and shipping updates to as it was only released last June), includes the vmklinux driver stack. For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor. It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.

rrdharan 4y ago

How do you propose banning this while permitting open source drivers for Windows? I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.

monocasa 4y ago
The key is in "derived from". Very few people would say NT is derived from some random drivers that nobody at Microsoft had a hand in writing. Taking existing code and having it form the foundation of a new kernel and claiming it as all closed source is quite a bit more obviously derived from that existing code open source code. "Derived from" is the core concept in the GPL; it actually doesn't use the word "link" at all. Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I thought they ripped the network stack from BSD. https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stack-based-on-unix/ https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...
  - monocasa 4y ago
    That's fair, I should have kept constrainig my statements to GPLed code. That being said, Microsoft complied with all of the license terms of that stack (basically shipping a copyright notice and constraining themselves on how they advertise it's use). If it was a GPLed stack and they never published source, I'd be saying the same thing about them that I'm saying now about VMware.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  They did publish the source to the GPL drivers as well as to the vmklinux “adapter”, and I don’t believe either the core hypervisor or the ESX kernel were derived from or adapted from the Linux kernel. My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem. Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver SDK and hardware vendors wrote native drivers for it. To me this seems very similar to the way Linux had for a while a way to run Wifi drivers originally written for NT, though it didn’t lead to the year of the Linux desktop as some of us might have hoped for at the time.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago. The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.