VMware’s contribution to the open source community is getting stronger. We already have contributed considerably in getting a vendor agnostic para-virtualization in the mainline Linux kernel. Several VMware employees also contribute to several open source projects on a personal basis as well. Now we’re taking it a step further.
Yesterday we published the full source of our VMware tools for Linux. Linux users will soon become premium class citizens for Virtual guests. The out-of-box experience will actually be much better than other OS’s once the distros start shipping the tools and drivers pre-installed. Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu has already pledged support, expect others to follow soon. The sources are published on SourceForge the popular open source repository. Why is this so important to the Linux community? The monolithic nature of the Linux kernel. In Linux there is no stable API we can hook into. Our kernel modules have to be compiled for every specific kernel update, something which is more or less impossible. Even for the Linux distributions we already support, we’re talking hundreds of pre-compiled kernel modules. Now they are shipping as open source, the distros can take ownership and ship updated VMware kernel modules at the time they update their own kernel.
And, we have not forgotten about our FreeBSD and OpenSolaris users either. I would assume they will adopt these drivers soon as well.
Update: I talked to Mark Shuttleworth in the Ubuntu boot, and he says they have a sporting chance to ship in Gutsy.
He also have the opinion we have a good chance to merge upstream as well. Nothing would be better.
