On February 28, 2019,the Hamburg
Higher Regional Court dismissed Christoph Hellwig’s appeal of the Hamburg
District Court’s dismissal. Mr. Hellwig, backed by Software
Freedom Conservancy, announced
that no further appeal will be lodged.
Hellwig had claimed that the
distribution of the VMware’s software Hypervisor vSphere VMware ESXi 5.5.0
constituted copyright infringement
because it, being a derivative work of Linux, was not licensed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL), nor was the complete corresponding source
code of VMware’s product being offered. See
an earlier IPKat post here
for more background of this suit.
 |
| Playing by rules. That's all there is to it. |
The appellate court dismissed on
the same grounds as the first instance court – insufficient proof of the ownership
right and copyrightability of the specific Linux components that ended up in the
VMware product. Hellwig contends that the courts might have been adversely
influenced by the allegedly abusive GPL litigation under the GPL brought by individual developers, such as Patrick
McHardy in a more recent case.
VMware has also demonstrated good
faith by announcing
its plans to deprecate the vmkLinux
APIs and associated driver ecosystem from its vSphere product. “Removal of the
Linux code from VMware's proprietary kernel was what both I and Conservancy
asked for many times; when VMware takes this action, they will finally comply
with the GPL.” – says Hellwig. So, the
two houses bury the hatchet. For now.
Hellwig and VMware go in peace (for now)
Reviewed by Ieva Giedrimaite
on
Monday, April 29, 2019
Rating:
Reviewed by Ieva Giedrimaite
on
Monday, April 29, 2019
Rating:
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