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

   code, and he has tirelessly corrected and commented on other developers'

   contributions.</dd>

  <dt id="court-documents">Are the court documents released?</dt>

  <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.  Unfortunately, VMware has explicitly asked for the

  filings not to be published.   Accordingly, Conservancy itself has not

  even been able to review VMware's statement of defense nor Christoph's

  response to that statement of defense.</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

  Conservancy's program activity in

  its <a href="/linux-compliance/about.html">GPL Compliance

  Project for Linux Developers</a>.</dd>

  <dd>This case is specifically regarding a combined work that VMware

  allegedly created by combining their own code (“vmkernel”) with

  portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2.  As such,

  this, to our knowledge, marks the first time an enforcement case is

  exclusively focused on this type of legal question relating to GPL.

  However, there are so many different ways to make combined and/or

  derivative works that are covered by GPL that no single case could possibly

  include all such issues. </dd>

    VMware to comply with GPL?</dt>

  <dd><p>Neither Conservancy nor Christoph takes this action lightly nor without

  exhausting every other possible alternative first.  This lawsuit is the

    outgrowth of years of effort to convince VMware to comply with GPL.</p>

    <p>In October 2011, Conservancy received a GPL violation report on

  BusyBox for VMware's ESXi products.  Conservancy opened the matter in its

  usual, friendly, and non-confrontational way.  Nevertheless, VMware

  immediately referred Conservancy to VMware's outside legal counsel in the

  USA, and Conservancy negotiated with VMware's legal counsel throughout

  late 2011, 2012 and 2013.  We exchanged and reviewed

  <a title="Complete, Corresponding Source" href="https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech6.html#x9-470005.2.1">CCS</a> candidates, and

  admittedly, VMware made substantial and good efforts toward compliance on

  BusyBox.  However, VMware still refused to fix a few minor and one major

  compliance problem that we discovered during the process.  Namely, there

  was a major violation regarding Linux itself that ultimately became

  Christoph's key complaint in this lawsuit.</p>

 <p>Meanwhile, when Conservancy realized in late 2012 there might be a major

 Linux violation still present in VMware's ESXi products, Conservancy

 representatives sought every industry contact we had for assistance,

 including those from trade associations, companies (both competitors and

 collaborators with VMware), and everyone else we could think of who might be