Christoph Hellwig announces today that he will appeal the ruling of the Hamburg District Court, which dismissed his case against VMware. The ruling concerned German evidence law; the Court did not rule on the merits of the case, i.e. the question whether or not VMware has to license the kernel of its product vSphere ESXi 5.5.0 under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.
The dismissal hinges on specific German evidentary rules related to documenting the copyrightability of Christoph's code used in VMware. In the opinion of the Court the materials submitted did not satisfy German evidence rules. Furthermore, the Court declined expert testimony on this point. Hellwig said:
"I'm disappointed that the court didn't even consider the actual case of reusing the Linux code written by me, and I hope the Court of Appeal will investigate this central aspect of the lawsuit."
The original version of the ruling (German) and an English translation are publicly available.