Over the past nine months, we have seen a growing consensus in the industry regarding one specific aspect of GPL compliance. Since the October 2017 announcement of the Linux kernel Technical Advisory Board’s Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement, which stated that the Linux kernel project was adopting the GPLv3 cure commitment, a significant number of key GPL code contributors have made similar statements not just for their Linux kernel contributions, but for all of their contributions under a family of GPL style licenses. Today, we are announcing that VMware has joined this growing group of key GPL code contributors and is also issuing a statement that commits us to adopting the GPLv3 cure approach for all licensees of our code that we released under GPLv2, LGPLv2 and LGPLv2.1
We at VMware think that this is the logical and right thing to do. This commitment gives everyone using our code greater predictability and a well-defined grace period in cases of potential license non-compliance. We are an active contributor to many third-party open source projects, and have ourselves released a significant number of projects under open source licenses. We want to do our part in creating an environment where our customers and partners in this industry can confidently use the code that we have released. We are excited to be a part of the broad group of supporters of this consensus.
Stay tuned to the Open Source Blog and follow us on Twitter (@vmwopensource) to stay up-to-date on all the latest breaking news.
