Fedora Core 3 Transferred to Fedora Legacy

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/23/06, Christopher A. Williams <chrisw01 at comcast.net> wrote:
> As someone also
> fairly active in the Fedora community, I'm inclined to think the *best*
> mix that satisfies everyone's needs here is to see if VMware would be
> willing to put together and support a FC5T2 and later VM

What an excellent idea. The community section already has an fc5t1
image in it as well. And if you follow the link to the fc5t1 community
image you see there is already an fc5t2 image at
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ which isn't in the vmware
community list yet.. but it will be.  Seems to me the community is
responding organically... this is a good thing{tm}.

But I do believe the hilighted "platform vendor" section are images
produced by the vendors and not by Vmware.  I still don't think its
appropriate as a matter of project goals to produce virtual images
that require the use of proprietary tools to produce or consume as
part of the Fedora project officially. If vmplayer images was simply a
compressed disk image created by something like dd, I'd have no
problem with it... but it isn't.


> Now this does bring a new issue to mind - because something GPL is being
> distributed inside a proprietary piece of technology, is the whole now a
> derivative product, thus making the virtualization technology also
> subject to the GPL? In other words, does distributing a Linux distro in
> a VM force you to also distribute the VM as GPL? I don't believe this to
> be the case - but it could be a grey area...

That is a much deeper question, a question you'll need to ask the FSF
about, vmware about  or get your own expert legal opinion to comment
on. Hopefully Vmware took the time to ask the FSF about this issue
before opening up their images catelog to include linux.  I suspect
there isn't an issue here, but I'd much rather avoid parsing the
legality of how the GPL interacts with vmplayer as part of a user
oriented mailinglist. I don't think we are going to get an appropriate
expert opinion on the matter here.

-jef