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Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

Having used Workstation, the graphic performance inside its GUI is really nice, it's better than anything else on the market by a far margin. It performs better than virt-manager/qemu on Linux.

Could this move require VMWare/BC to release source code that could improve qemu/virt-manager? KVM is GPL if not mistaken.

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Wouldn't KVM be part of the kernel interface to userspace? The emulated devices aren't really part of KVM, are they?

I was thinking due to modified code and copyleft/GPL it could force copyleft on Workstation, but I may have misunderstood how it works.

Yes, you probably misunderstand. KVM is part of the Linux kernel, which is GPL licensed. The GPL only prohibits derivations of a GPL'd projects from using a difference license. (Actually, copyright law prohibits this.) Using one piece of software alongside another does not count as a derivation. It has always been possible to run proprietary software on the Linux kernel, for example. This is no different.

I believe (IANAL) the implementation of KVM is GPL because it's part of Linux, but that's not viral into user space.

I'm no expert on licensing but I seem to remember GPL requires making available source if using and if the GPL project is modified, though I could be entirely mistaken.

They’re making modifications to kernel code, which they’re upstreaming. They don’t need to open anything that’s on the user side of the syscall interface.

There’s plenty of closed source software that runs on Linux, VMware workstation included.

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