On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 05:36:32PM +0100, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
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.
Look at the license of the modules themselves that vmware offers. A number of them recently switched to be: MODULE_LICENSE("GPL"); but at the same time, they introduced 3 new ones that are closed. So the end result is the same, we can't ship them :(
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.
Yeah, that's a horrible excuse. I've been talking with them for a long time about this, and they are finally starting to realize that they need to change this. But they move very slowly, so don't count on any big changes any time soon.
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.
No, it wouldn't stop them from this at all. It's no different from any other company that ships updated drivers for their products for older kernel releases. vmware is not unique at all, despite what they keep claiming (and wishing...)
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!)
If someone sends me the vmware code, under the GPL, I can get it into the next kernel version with about a days work. It's not hard at all, I don't know why people claim that... thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org