In <a href="http://bombadil.infradead.org/~hch/vmware/2016-08-09.html">a

    statement on his website</a>, Christoph Hellwig announced that he will

    appeal the ruling. Christoph also published

    (in <a href="http://bombadil.infradead.org/~hch/vmware/Urteil_2016-07-08.pdf">German</a>

    and <a href="http://bombadil.infradead.org/~hch/vmware/Judgment_2016-07-08.pdf">English)

    the Court's ruling</a> which explains why the materials submitted did not

    satisfy German evidence rules — despite publicly available

    information in Linux's Git repositories. In addition, the Court chose not

    to seek expert testimony.</dd>

  <dt id="statements-of-support">Have others issued statements of support about this action?</dt>

  <dd>Various individuals and groups have publicly stated their support for

    Conservancy's and Hellwig's actions in this matter.  They include:

    <ul>

        <li><a href="http://www.april.org/en/statement-support-software-freedom-conservancy-and-christoph-hellwig-gpl-enforcement-lawsuit">APRIL</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://fsf.org/news/conservancy-and-christoph-hellwig-gpl-enforcement-lawsuit">Free

            Software Foundation</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://fsfe.org/news/2015/news-20150331-01.en.html">Free

            Software Foundation Europe</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://www.gnome.org/news/2015/03/gnome-supports-gpl-compliance-through-vmware-suit-2/">GNOME Foundation</a></li>

        <li><a href="http://opensource.org/node/739">Open Source Initiative</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://samba.org/samba/news/announcements/2015-03-06_vmware_lawsuit.html">The

            Samba Team</a></li>

        <li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/p/swig/news/2015/03/defending-the-gpl/">The

        SWIG Project</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/573530001758294016">Matthew Garrett, Linux Developer</a></li>

        <li><a href="/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/#glikely">Grant Likely, Linux Kernel Engineer</a></li>

        <li><a href="http://mina86.com/2015/03/11/the-time-has-come-to-stand-up-for-the-gpl/">Michal Nazarewicz, Linux Developer</a></li>

        <li><a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/635624/">Luis R. Rodriguez (aka mcgrof), Linux Developer</a></li>

        <li><a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/635855/">Wolfram Sang, Linux Developer</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://twitter.com/josh_triplett/status/573543072929198083">Josh

        Triplett, Linux Developer</a></li>

        <li><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/635617/">Rik van Riel, Linux Developer</a></li>

    </ul>

  </dd>

<dt>I

see <a href="https://fsf.org/news/conservancy-and-christoph-hellwig-gpl-enforcement-lawsuit">FSF's

statement of support</a>, but why

isn't <a href="https://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance">FSF enforcing</a> in

this case?</dt>

<dd>While FSF are the authors and license steward of the GNU GPL, it's up to

the copyright holder to enforce GPL.  VMware created an operating system by

combining parts of the kernel named Linux with their own proprietary code,

and then added BusyBox to provide the userspace operating system components.

As such, ESXi is not

a <a href="https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html">traditional GNU/Linux

system</a>.  FSF has many copyrights of its own, but these are almost

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