to answer: <q>We cannot comment on this while litigation is pending</q>.</p>

<dl>

  <dt>Who is the Plaintiff in the lawsuit?</dt>

  <dd>Christoph is one of most active developers of the Linux kernel. He has

   contributed 279.653 lines of code to the latest Linux 3.19 kernel, and

   thus ranks 20th amongst the 1,340 developers involved in that release.

   Christoph also ranks 4th among those who have reviewed third-party source

   code, tirelessly corrected and commented on other developers'

   contributions.</dd>

  <dd>Not currently.  Court proceedings are not public by default in Germany

  (unlike in the USA).  Conservancy will continue to update this FAQ with

  information that Conservancy knows about the case.  We would all also

  welcome an agreement with VMware whereby both sides would agree to publish

  all Court documents. </dd>

  <dt>Who's funding this lawsuit?</dt>

  <dd>Conservancy has engaged in a grant agreement with Christoph Hellwig for

  the purposes of pursuing this specific legal action in Germany.

  Conservancy is funding this legal action specifically as part of

 achieve compliance — negotiations that ended in an outright refusal by

 VMware's lawyers to comply.  Those events were then followed by a year of

   work by Christoph and Till to achieve compliance in a separate action.</p>

 <p>Simply put, Conservancy and Christoph fully exhausted every possible

 non-litigation strategy and tactic to convince VMware to do the right thing

 before filing this litigation.</p>

  </dd>    

  <dt>Can you explain further how VMware incorporated code from Linux into

  their kernel?</dt>

    understand it.  The diagram compares the technical architecture of a full,

    running Linux kernel with a full, running VMware kernel:

    <p>

      <a href="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_en.png">

    <img class="inside-faq" alt="[Diagram of Linux and VMware running kernels]" src="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_en_scaled.png" /></a>

    </p>

    <p>If you want to download the diagram, it's available

    in <a href="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_en.svg">SVG

    (English)</a>, <a href="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_en.png">PNG

    (English)</a>, <a href="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_de.svg">SVG

    (German)</a>, and <a href="/linux-compliance/linux-vs-vmkernel_de.png">PNG