Free as in Freedom

0x66: The End of Hellwig vs. VMware

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Bradley and Karen discuss the details of the completion

of the lawsuit (which Conservancy supported) between Christoph Hellwig and
VMware in Germany.

Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:37)
  • Bradley mentioned the episode of Red Dwarf,
    • White
    Hole, where the characters
    are speaking too slowly or two quickly due to time
    differentials. (01:30)
  • Bradley explained that the
    • Hellwig vs. VMware suit in Germany has concluded. (03:30)
  • German is a civil law
    • legal system. (05:15)
  • Christoph Hellwig announced
    • on his website that he has decided not to appeal. (07:18)
  • Bradley did a technical
    • analysis how much of Christoph's code appeared in the infringing VMware
    product. (07:50)
  • Till Jaeger
    • was Christoph's lawyer; Till was also the lawyer for Harald Welte's
    (currently defunct) gpl-violations.org
    project. (09:04)
    Segment 1 (09:26)
    • “Trolling”
      • refers to being a non-practicing entity. Patrick McHardy is specifically
      a practicing entity, since he upstreamed a lot of code in
      Linux. (09:50)
    • Bradley was thinking of the patent troll, Intellectual
      • Ventures. (10:40)
    • Bradley that the Eastern
      • district of Texas hears many patent cases in the USA. (10:50)
    • Bradley mentioned a This
      • American Life, Episode 411, which discussed patents. Show
      hosts/producers Laura Sydell and Alex Blumberg visit one of those
      “empty-but-not” office buildings in the Eastern District of
      Texas. (11:18)
    • Bradley
      • and Karen wrote about Patrick McHardy's behavior back in July 2016
      — Conservancy was the first to talk about it publicly. Bradley
      sought to prevent the “compliance industrial complex” from
      using knowledge of Patrick's behavior to unduly scare people. (13:10)
    • Conservancy (with FSF) also published the
      • Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement (15:10)
    • The rest of the Netfilter team,
      • except for Patrick McHardy, endorsed the
      Principles. (16:30)
    • The VMware suit started 2015-03-05, and began before Patrick McHardy
      • started his problematic behavior. While the VMware suit was working its
      way through the court, McHardy had filed many inappropriate
      lawsuits. (18:30)
    • German court decisions are very rarely published, but thanks to hard
      • work by everyone involved, the appeal
      decision, and the lower
      Court's decision (the latter of which was also translated
      into English.) (27:30)
      Segment 2 (33:01)
    • In the next episode, Karen will discuss the Kernel Enforcement
      • Statement Additional Permission, and the Red Hat “Cooperation
      Commitment”. (35:40)

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