VMware Cloud on AWS in Asia-Pacific now live out of Sydney
VMware has on Monday announced the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS for customers in Australia and New Zealand. Read more: https://zd.net/2NgoUZH
What happens next?
In an e-mail interview, Karen Sandler, attorney and the Conservancy’s executive director, wrote, “We strongly believe that litigation is necessary against willful GPL violators, particularly in cases like VMware where this is strong community consensus that their behavior is wrong. Litigation moves slowly. We will continue to discuss this with Christoph and his lawyers and hope to say more about it in the coming weeks — after the courts provide their rationale for their decision to the parties (which has not yet occurred).”
VMware stated it didn’t believe the case “was in the interests of the parties involved or the broader Linux kernel community. VMware continues to be a strong supporter of open source software development and remains willing to engage in a dialogue to address any issues or concerns from the open source community.”
The company also stated, “For reasons unrelated to the litigation, VMware has been actively working on a multi-year project with the goal of removing vmklinux from vSphere, and hopes to accomplish this in an upcoming major release.”
Some has taken this as an admission of wrong doing. Perhaps it is.
Sandler explained:
While some who read VMware’s statement will be surprised to learn that VMware seeks to remove vmklinux from vSphere, in fact that effort began during Conservancy’s original, direct enforcement work with VMware in the United States. VMware knew what they were doing was wrong, but continued to generate revenue by infringing copyrights in Linux, while only slowly working toward non-infringement. As we have always said, we simply want companies to follow the rules and do the right thing when they incorporate GPL’d code into products. VMware should follow Linux’s license properly today, and not as part of ‘a multi-year project.’ While GPL enforcement is the primary catalyst to change behavior of bad actors, as it has done here, it’s wrong for companies to force the FOSS [Free and Open Source Software] community to spend substantial resources to convince these bad actors to behave appropriately.
So, while VMware hopes “that this litigation is now behind us,” the case may not be over yet. Eventually, regardless of what happens in the court, the possibly offending code will no longer be within VMware’s current products.
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