VMware joins The Linux Foundation

As someone who is interested in getting VMware to participate more in the open source community, I see this announcement as another step in the right direction. Despite what the nay-sayers may say.

I strongly believe that Linux and open source software are very important to VMware. Can we be doing more in terms of participation and contribution? Absolutely. However, this is going to take time. The good news is that we are already starting to making targeted contributions. For example, as the announcement says:

“VMware’s participation in the Linux community includes the contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a paravirtualization interface as an open specification, and subsequent collaboration with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of a source-level paravirtualization interface (paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel. In 2007, VMware announced the release of its Open Virtual Machine Tools, the open source implementation of VMware Tools, and the creation of the open-vm-tools project to enable community participation.”

Another intiative a few of us inside the company have been working on is to make sure we only ship linux kernel modules under the GPL v2. No more proprietary kernel modules. While this may currently not be the case, I have every belief that we will indeed make this happen.

In the meantime, if you have ideas/thoughts/suggestions on how we could become more involved with the open source community, feel free to leave a comment.

A fresh start

I’ve toyed with the idea of blogging on and off for a few years now. For the most part, I lacked the discipline to update the blog on a periodic basis. However, I’ve always wanted to resurrect my writing. I enjoyed it a lot in high school and then just stopped. Lately, I’ve been trying Twitter. Somehow, the telegraphic style isn’t quite the same as a blog post.

So, here I am, hoping for a fresh start.