Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Speaking of fog, I wonder what you consider the worst U.S. legal offense VMWare is guilty of? I worked there for about a year in 2008 and early 2009. My recollection is, that given my general following of lwn/slashdot, for the entire duration of my employment there, the GPL case/s were considered closed, legally, and as far as the mainstream press (including lwn/slashdot) were concerned. You use some foggy words there- like 'arrogant'. Obviously arrogance is not criminal. And I'll admit, there was at least an average level of silicon valley arrogance present at VMWare. But there are different types of arrogance. Specifically I never had direct knowledge of any colleagues that didn't "know rules are rules", though I imagine that kind of arrogance is indeed common enough unfortunately. The arrogance that might sound plausible to me is "thinking one has found a way to exploit profit within the rules" but not actually being correct. I'm curious if you have an opinion that such happened with VMWare in a way that involved violation of U.S. law. (I focus on U.S. because it's where I live, and I have a remarkably low opinion of many other countries laws, even at the same time I have a low opinion of the U.S.'s). Once a year or two ago after reading an LWN article and giving the issue more thought that I probably should, I managed to plausibly grok the issue in some way that boiled down to the core nuance being whether or not it made a difference that two bits of code ran on the same, or different processors in an SMP system. It seems radically unlikely I understood the issue, but that was the point that I remember. Just now, giving a go at grokking the 'worst U.S. legal offence BrucePerens might consider VMWare guilty of', I went to wikipedia and then a reference, and saw something about no busybox source code provided despite binary redistribution. That sounded cut and dry enough to me, but doesn't seem to mesh with the lack of accusation against them in the 2008 timeframe. My vague recollection following the story is maybe that was something they fixed, apologized, and nobody held much of a grudge about. Which gets back to my curiosity as to which is the clearest cut guilt you accuse them of. Or 'foggily' accuse them of to be more precise. Certainly if there is something clearcut, I'd like to know about it and factor into my personal mental assessment of the previous employer. I don't think I've actually used their software since I left, nor plan on it, because I go with FOSS options when available personally. But it's not because I currently have an impression that they did anything wrong WRT GPL. In general I just consider a fact of life people trying to exploit cornercases of nuanced legality to try and provide financially for their families, even if 'the community' doesn't like the extent to which they hoarde their exploitive profits.