[monocasa]

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.

[rrdharan]

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]

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.

[rrdharan]

You’re referring to the Console OS which they also did open source (it was just Red Hat, sources available upon request).

The relationship between the Console OS and the Vmkernel / hypervisor was very similar to the relationship between Windows/Linux/macOS and VMware Workstation/Fusion, which were also proprietary software not derived from any of those OSes.

[monocasa]

No, I'm referring to the vmklinux driver stack which has always had the purpose of running GPLed code directly by hypervisor without the consoleos mediating access to hardware.

Also, does 'they' actually include 'you'? Googling your username seems to connect you with vmware code pretty intimately.

[AtlasBarfed]

I thought they ripped the network stack from BSD.

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...

[monocasa]

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.