Kernel contributions from organisations and individual privacy

[Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu)]

On Sun, 14 Jun 2015 17:25:40 -0400, Nicholas Krause said:
> Why are we even trying to prove this,  it seems any intelligent company who has
> a interest in staying in business will comply

The problem is companies that have mixed in their own "secret sauce", and
are afraid of said sause becoming non-secret as part of their required GPL
compliance.  If you have a competent legal department, you'll file lots
of motions and so on to delay that final court order as long as you can.

See VMWare for the details - they've got enough legal staff that it took
like 7 years for Hellwig to team up with funded legal support.  And it will
almost certainly be an eventual loss for VMWare - but they can delay that for
months or years.

And VMWare certainly doesn't want to release their code - mostly because
it's almost certainly a creeping horror worthy of mockery.

If you don't believe me, go look at the GPL kernel drivers for VMWare Workstation
or Player, which are probably similar to the ESXi code that VMWare
would have to release.  How bad are the WS/Player drivers?  Let's just
say that Greg KH probably wouldn't let them into drivers/staging. :)
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