Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (422 mails)

["Dominique Leuenberger" <Dominique.Leuenberger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > On 1/12/2009 at  5:24 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxx> wrote: 
> > > But note, it doesn't have the vmware drivers as they violate the GPL and
> > > can not be redistributed, and virtualbox drivers, well, let's just say
> > > some of us looked at that code, and ran away screaming :)
> >
> > Greg, I hope you're kidding ;)
>
> About the virtualbox drivers?  not at all.

So you had quiet some fun reading them...

> > We have open-vm-tools KMPs in the distribution, which brings all the
> > drivers for a VMware session you possibly might need. All nicely under
> > GPL.
>
> Ah, sorry, I was confused, it's the vmware "host" side drivers that are
> still closed source.  Those we can not redistribute.

Actually even there I'm not so sure about the entire thing: to my understanding 
from several discussions (I'm active there a bit, as I'm packaging
open-vm-tools, so things like this just raise) seems to be that the host part 
is almost identical, with very few exceptions. The module set is more or
less the same; for Vsock there are other DEFINES used. 

I'm not sure though if vmware themself is interested in having the modules 
shipped by default, as their concern is giving 'power of updating' out of
the hand. Now, with every release of vmware, they can ship a new module set. 
Having them upstreamed in the kernel would stop them from doing so (or
adding them in the 'update' folder, but then newer kernel would be ignored... I 
think there is no feature to just load the 'newest' driver.

So I'll start a discussion over at vmware, maybe for 11.2 we can actually get 
the support for the host also in (if license permits of course!)

Dominique
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