Submitted by Today, VMware announced that it has released a majority of its VMware Tools as open source software (GPLv2), part of the project Open Virtual Machine Tools. “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.”
This is one good news. Now, I hope we will see gfx card drivers for older/alternative OSes.
This is one good news. Now, I hope we will see gfx card drivers for older/alternative OSes.
Surprise! This doesn’t include video drivers.
Basically it appears that this boils down to a memory control module (probably to help the host/guest memory management coordination – i don’t know the details), a file locking driver for drag-n-drop support?, a host<->guest file transfer tool, and looks like a tool to manage the automatic resolution adjustment when the host window is resized (at least, I think that’s what it does – but it’s not a video driver).
So, if you’re looking for a video driver, it references x.org – where a driver already exists.
Oh also, there’s a vmxnet driver – but I doubt many OSes actually need that at this point – especially when VMWare emulates several different network chipsets. (oh, i see there’s some fancy cpu/memory reduction involved with this driver – so I guess people who use vmware often, this is a nice driver).
Edited 2007-09-12 22:41
I guess this is a really smart step by VMware. Does this mean i can use “Unity” with ubuntu soon?
With some good luck, yup.
This is great news for me. I know very little about how smart this is as a marketing move, but for me as a developer, it’s interesting. I can’t wait to have a look at the sources just in order to see what’s around.
Now I just can’t wait to see what Microsoft is going to open source :-P.
I see a headline…
Microsoft becomes an open source company to compete with open source.
It has been hypothesized that VMware was using code that required them to contribute the source in an open manner. Or is VMware doing this of their own accord?
Wheither they are ‘forced’ to do it or do it voluntary doesn’t really matter it’s good news either way.
I think this is just strategy to keep the focus on VMWare and not on the competition, Sun like move.
You are free to diff the code, I’m sure you’ll find a few matching variable names and a few commas. These are usually enough for Cease and Desist letters, I can’t wait to see one of these mentioning GPL.
Seriously, the alleged breaking of the GPL didn’t have anything to do with VMware Tools, which are, essentially, drivers.
Did you misread the announcement? Their open sourcing the tools.. not their virtualization software
.
In reality, this will allow developers of operating systems to freely “interface” with the virtual machines etc..
As for them violating GPL, exactly “which” project would they “steal” from? You GPL zealots are annoying..
Which project? Surely you know that ESX 3 uses linux as a kind of bootstrap to load the hypervisor, and the question becomes whether or not the hypervisor now constitutes a derivative work.
I’m not saying this is true, but obviously linux would be the project they’d want to “steal” from if they were going to.
Dude, before you start calling people zealots, you might actually want to read up on what’s been going on in the IT world recently.
There has been quite a few questions asked about ESX3 and, more specifically, if it can be considered a derived work of the Linux kernel.
I understand if you don’t like, or care, about this sort of thing but if you use software for your proprietary product, you need to abide by the license of that software.
How would you feel if VMWare built ESX3 on top of FBSD yet ‘forgot’ to mention that in they’re copyright?
Just because they use linux to setup an environment to boot their hyporvisor doesn’t mean they have to give you the code to ESX. At most it means they have to dish out their bootstrapping code. It is quite easy to use linux to setup and boot DOS/BeOS/OpenStep/etc… but this by no means says that I have to give you the code to any of those OS’s.
A derivative work is not “anything it touches”
I agree but your interpretation of the GPL has nothing to do with the argument. Nobody is saying VMWare needs to give me, or anybody else for that matter, they’re whole product. If the ESX3 bootstrap is a derived work, than that code needs to be released under the GPL, period.
Your personal opinion is of no consequence here.
Quite funny that you call me a GPL zealot when my systems of choice use CDDL (Solaris) and BSD(NetBSD). Perhaps you should look for a forum where the only intent is to argue versus one of discussion.
To give credit where it is due, is to look between the lines regardless of license, especially if you read about the questionable underpinnings of the ESX server.
The question here is not whether one license is better than the other, but rather how honorable is VMware and how “innovative” is their product if they use mostly off-the-shelf technology.
This will help VMware, no doubt, but it’s really good news for people who already use VMware and want to run guests that aren’t as well supported as others.
Hey maybe now we’ll actually get 6.x support. I’ve had luck running hostd and the vmmemctl module from the 5.x tools on 6.x without any instability, but we’re still missing vmxnet. It’d also be nice to be able to install it from the ports tree without having to manually fetch the distribution file.
Now I’m waiting for someone to start hacking through QNX source and port VMWare tools to it as well as a new ATI driver!
This surely is an eventful week. I wonder who will release something tomorrow…