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by monocasa 1485 days 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.
1 comments
rrdharan 1485 days ago
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.

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monocasa 1484 days ago
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.

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