Did VMware Flout Open Source License Terms?

By Jack M. Germain 03/20/15 12:21 PM PT

The Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this month announced that it was funding a lawsuit filed by Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Germany.

The conservancy entered a grant agreement with Hellwig for the legal action. Its funding of the legal action is part of the program activity of its GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

The suit alleges that VMware failed to comply with terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, or GPLv2 -- the license of Linux and other free and open source software incorporated in VMware's ESXi products.

The case stretches back to 2007, but it became more contentious in 201, when the conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide or offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products, as required by BusyBox's GPLv2 license.

"We were involved in this fight long before Christoff got involved," noted Software Freedom Conservancy President Bradley M. Kuhn.

"There were times when we thought VMware was going to comply. They were working towards getting better. That is why we let it go for so long -- we felt we were making progress," he told LinuxInsider.

VMware has insisted that its hypervisor operating system, ESXi, does not violate GPLv2.

ESXi is an operating system that manages the hardware and software resources of the physical server. At the core of the ESXi operating system is a kernel called "vmkernel," which provides control over those resources.

As with many other operating systems, ESXi's vmkernel has a stable, general-purpose API, called "VMK API," that enables device drivers and other loadable modules to perform specialized functions.

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Did VMware Flout Open Source License Terms?