Conservancy Sues VMware Over GPL Compliance

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 5 March 2015 at 12:42 PM EST. 20 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
The Software Freedom Conservancy has today announced a lawsuit against VMware for failing to comply with the GPL on Linux.

The Software Freedom Conservancy is backing a lawsuit against VMware in Hamburg,Germany for failing to comply with the GPLv2 license of Linux and other open/free software projects included within VMware ESXi products. VMware has misused GPL-licensed code for years, VMware has failed to offer source code to their version of BusyBox, etc. Kernel developer Christoph Hellwig is the one part of the Software Freedom Conservancy named in the lawsuit who has seen his copyright violated.

VMware and the Software Freedom Conservancy tried to settle matters outside of court for the past few years, but they failed to resolve the issue and VMware continues to distribute their binary blobs without sources. Vmkernel is another VMware component believed to be based off GPLv2 Linux kernel source code that's distributed without source.

More details on this lawsuit can be found via SFConservancy.org.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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