VMTN Blog

[update below: Philip thinks this is a big deal]

VMware announced that it has released a majority of VMware Tools as open source software as part of the project Open Virtual Machine Tools. VMware Tools is a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and improve management of VMware virtual machines. Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) is hosted at http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net, and the source code is available today to enable Linux vendors to integrate open-sourced VMware Tools into upcoming versions of their operating systems.

Recent VMwarian Elliot Lee explains:

I'm at VMware's VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco. There is a variety of VMware news that might be considered "big", but the biggest from my perspective is the open-sourcing of much of VMware Tools, the tools that run inside the guest operating system to make the guest run better and handle the guest-side integration with the host OS. Think drag-and-drop between guest & host, automatic clock synchronization, etc...

The new project, Open Virtual Machine Tools is not such big news as far as the open source community , but VMware is big enough that this small change should matter to quite a few people. For example, I just ran into Marty Wesley of rPath, and no doubt the hackers over there will be very happy to hear this announcement, since it will make their work easier. And I get to help increase the amount of open source software, which is partly why I came here. :)

Ars Technica:

VMware's decision to open the source code is highly advantageous for the open source software community. Distributions will now be able to provide VMware Tools packages through standard package management systems, which means that users will no longer have to manually compile the kernel modules during installation. The company is in the process of communicating with major vendors and distributions to make sure that VMware Tools packages will be included in standard repositories. VMware also seems interested in working with the open source software community to bring VMware Tools support to other operating systems besides Linux.

h0bbel has a question:

Interesting move by VMware, as it really isn't that long ago that users were not even allowed to redistribute VMware tools pre-installed inside their virtual appliances. It will be very interesting to see what improvements the open source community will bring to the table as people start hacking the code.

Exciting, but I have one question: What happens if the OVMT over time ends up being a better product than the original VMware tools? Specifically, what happens with the Windows version of VMware tools if OVMT gets improvements released under the GPL that the Windows version would benefit from? VMware can't port the code back to the non-gpl version and only release it in a binary form now can they?

[I am not an open source lawyer, nor am I privy to VMware's strategy here, but I assume improvements are welcomed and that we'd distribute the source of improved GPLed components of the Windows Tools. -JMT]

[update: VMware's Philip Langdale thinks this is a big deal. I do too.

I think this is genuinely a big deal - it opens the door to integrating the tools into distros so that a newly created vm starts up with all the tools in place and updates to them come through the standard distro mechanisms. I also hope we see them ported to other operating systems. If you wished your favourite boutique OS had full guest support, now it can.

]