{% extends "base_compliance.html" %}
{% block subtitle %}GPL Compliance Project For Linux Developers - {% endblock %}
{% block subtitle %}Copyleft Compliance Projects - {% endblock %}
{% block submenuselection %}VMwareLawsuitAppeal{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
<h2>The time has come to stand up for the GPL.</h2>
<p><em>Last month, Conservancy <a href="/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">announced Christoph Hellwig's
lawsuit against VMware in Germany</a>. Help us meet our anonymous match to
support Conservancy's and Christoph's efforts in this area
by <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">becoming a Conservancy
supporter</a> or <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">donating via
the link on the right</a>.</em></p>
<p>We were told to ask nicely and repeatedly, so we did.</p>
<p>We asked allies to help us make contact in friendly and professional
ways.</p>
<p>Everyone asked us to give companies as many chances as possible and as
much help as possible to comply with copyleft, so we did.</p>
<p>We've worked for years to help VMware comply with the GPL, but they
refuse. Negotiations broke down for the last time when they insisted on an
NDA just to discuss settlement terms!</p>
<p>Christoph is among the most active developers of Linux. As of Feburary
19, 2015, Christoph has contributed 279,653 lines of code to the Linux kernel,
and ranks 20th among the 1,340 developers involved in the latest 3.19 kernel
release. Christoph also
ranks 4th among those who have reviewed third-party source code, tirelessly
corrected and commented on other developers' contributions. Christoph
licenses his code to the public under the terms of the GPL for practical and
ideological reasons. VMware, a company with net revenue of over $1 billion
and over 14,000 employees, ignored Christoph's choice. They took Christoph's
code from Linux and modified it to work with their own kernel without releasing
source code of the resulting complete work. This is precisely the kind of
activity Christoph and other kernel developers seek to prevent by choosing
the GPL. The GPL was written to prevent this specific scenario!</p>
<h3>This is a matter of principle.</h3>
<p>Free and open source software is everywhere and in everything; yet our
software freedom is constantly eroded.</p>
<p>We want companies to incorporate our software into new products, but there
are a few simple rules. Copylefted free software is so prevalent because
there's no way a company can compete without using a significant amount of
free software to bring products to market in reasonable time. They get so
much benefit from our work. Allowing the whole community to review, use,