I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.
Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem.
Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver SDK and hardware vendors wrote native drivers for it.
To me this seems very similar to the way Linux had for a while a way to run Wifi drivers originally written for NT, though it didn’t lead to the year of the Linux desktop as some of us might have hoped for at the time.
The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...
