> Did they ever stop blatantly violating the GPL in ESX?
If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).
It sounds like vmklinux is deprecated but still shipping for older drivers if I'm understanding their documentation. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-... vSphere 6.7 (which they're still supporting and shipping updates to as it was only released last June), includes the vmklinux driver stack.
For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor.
It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.
If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).