VMWare goes open source

Well, I just learned about this, and I’m excited :)

http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/

The Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools. They are a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and user experience of virtual machines. As virtualization technology rapidly becomes mainstream, each virtualization solution provider implements their own set of tools and utilities to supplement the guest virtual machine. However, most of the implementations are proprietary and are tied to a specific virtualization platform.

With the source code readily available, users of VMware products today (and other virtualization platforms too, in the future) will get these tools bundled and delivered through their distribution specific package manager. This should provide a seamless installation/upgrade experience and ease the burden on sysadmins. In fact, if you are looking to package the source for your favorite Linux distribution, we have included some helpful documentation.

So, you can just say:

apt-get install vmware
yum install vmware
urpmi vmware

and it just flies. The great thing is that technically superior VMWare technology goes open source and all those threats from Microsoft or Xen about putting them out of business soon became completely void now.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2007-09-13