VMware Joins The Linux Foundation

by Lisa Hoover - Aug. 07, 2008Comments (2)

Virtualization vendor VMware is the latest company to join The Linux Foundation, a national organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. While there are several software vendors in the consortium, VMware is the first to focus solely on virtualization and cloud computing.

Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and solutions at VMware, says joining the Linux Foundation provides access to a collaborative forum to address the needs of VMware's customers. According to a prepared statement, he says "VMware will work with the Linux Foundation and its members to address the increasing number of Linux users who are working with High Performance Computing (HPC), managed desktops, Web 2.0 technologies, and Software as a Service (SaaS) in virtualized environments."

The move is the latest in a string of announcements from the company, including the release of Open Virtual Machine Tools, the creation of the open-vm-tools project, and the news that ESXi hypervisor is now available for free.

Our own Sam Dean suggests that VMware may be losing it's long-standing stronghold on the virtualization community as open source alternatives gain traction, and competitors give away their products for free or bundled with other products.

While the inclusion of VMware on The Linux Foundation's membership roster is certainly good news, CNet's Matt Asay points out that it doesn't answer the question of what the company plans to do about allegations VMware is in violation of the GPL. Asay notes,"VMware can't hope to cozy up to Linux and its community without participating on the principles of transparency and trust. At present, it has shown little of the former and has yet to earn much of the latter."


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2 Comments
 

VMware has put out some stuff for 'free', but their track record for open-sourcing any code to foster further innovation is rather poor. I wonder if their participation will change this.

0 Votes

VMware had a huge lead over Xen, but with the widespread adoption that has happened with Xen, it is only a matter of time that VMware will become a much skinnier gorilla, especially with the Redmond threat. Go Open Source now and get all the xnix platforms on your side!

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