VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software [LWN.net]

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 11, 2007 20:07 UTC (Tue) by alceste (subscriber, #39742) [Link]

> Does this mean that I can yum install vmtools and plug in a windows cd to
> install it and play games?
> Does this mean that I can do fast emulation of the Linux distros I need to
> test my software on, like I should be able to do with Xen and Qemu?

Well, not quite. If I understand correctly, VMware, Inc. released the source code of some tools that allow easier communication between the guest and host operating systems, running under the proprietary VMware virtual machine.

These tools should be something like the "Guest Additions" of VirtualBox (http://virtualbox.org/), that allow e.g. to share the clipboard or filesystem folders between the guest and host system. The only difference is that VirtualBox is *completely* free software, try it ;-)

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 11, 2007 20:32 UTC (Tue) by sholdowa (guest, #34811) [Link]

No you need to use vmware player or vmware server for that purpose. Both are closed source, but free.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 11, 2007 21:40 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

Neither of those things. This means that if you have a linux guest
running inside the (still proprietary) VMware hypervisor then you'll be
able to install the VMware Tools that make the guest work better (e.g.
time syncing, better network drivers, clever X mode changing, etc.) as
free software. Whether distros include them in their trees or not will be
interesting, since they are, of course, useless without VMware. Most
distros do seem to include the already Free VMware X driver.

Some versions of VMware are already available free-as-in-beer, if that's
of any use.

Releasing the actual hypervisor would be fairly amazing, but might
actually be a good idea - the kind of mindshare that would buy may
actually be a very good way of selling the higher level management tools,
which is where the money is made. That would essentially then be the
XenSource business model, though given the (IMO) general superiority of
VMware to Xen it may well kill XenSource off.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 11, 2007 22:17 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

Yeah so it sounds like what VM Ware is giving away is pretty much "Nothing Useful." It's the old garage sell thing: Open Source something obsolete or useless to appear to be an OSS company.

I think VM Ware will eventually be sidelined by Xen or Qemu if they keep the way they're going. I know I have no use for them.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 11, 2007 23:05 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

These pieces (if included in a Linux distro) will make it much easier for anyone running any one of VMWare's emulation platforms to integrate a Linux guest instance with their host operating system, since it essentially provides sort of an "acceleration/enabling layer" with regard to the video driver, filesystem, clipboard, etc.

In other words, if you're running Linux inside VMWare on Windows or Linux (or OS X? I don't know if this works there yet or not...), this will give you a better experience out of the box once it's merged into distros.

If you're running *Windows* inside VMWare (i.e. on Linux, to keep it safely away from real hardware), this will not help you at all.

So it seems this will, on balance, help Windows users more than Linux users, as they're (perhaps) more likely to be running Linux inside VMWare than someone already running Linux on the bare hardware. (And they're more numerous too, which translates into More Profit For VMWare.)

And so, in conclusion, the released pieces are not "Nothing Useful"... it's just that it seems to be that you are not one of the people that will find it to be useful.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 15:02 UTC (Wed) by fandom (subscriber, #4028) [Link]

If you are running Linux, you may still very well want to run linux as a
guest system.

For example, if you want to make sure your program will run in different
distros, or if you want simulate the deployment of a new program, like
Apache, SugarCRM or whatever, in a crontrolled enviroment.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 6:47 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

How different is it from some hardware vendor providing better Linux drivers for its hardware. A typical distor has some software to support various laptop types, display adapters, printers, and such.

We don't have the full designs for them. We cannot fully reproduce them. Does this mean we should noot make Linux work better on those platforms?

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 14:04 UTC (Wed) by aliguori (subscriber, #30636) [Link]

Yeah so it sounds like what VM Ware is giving away is pretty much "Nothing Useful." It's the old garage sell thing: Open Source something obsolete or useless to appear to be an OSS company.

Not from my perspective. The guest tools provide a whole set of functions that simply cannot be emulated. Things like drag-n-drop, shared clipboard, power management, ballooning, shared filesystem, etc. It's really a massive amount of functionality. None of it is really that amazing on it's own but it's a rather large mass of code.

What's really exciting, is that we'll be able to use these tools (with a little modification) on things like KVM. The direct result of this is that KVM is going to get a bunch of new features really quickly.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 0:06 UTC (Wed) by ianburrell (subscriber, #47313) [Link]

The other thing that it would be very nice for VMware to release as open source are the kernel drivers that run on the Linux host operating system. The important ones are vmmon and vmnet. They are distributed as source since they need to be compiled for a specific kernel. But they aren't open source.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 2:37 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

Not only are they not "open source", they're actually confidential. Who even knows what that could mean?

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 6:51 UTC (Wed) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

Where did you find that text?

The web site says:

"VMware is announcing the release of large portions of VMware Tools for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD guests under GPL and GPL-compatible licenses."

And the file headers of what is available for download (at this point, at least) seem to reflect that.

None of the files contain the word "confidential" and the ones I opened have this blurb at the top:

/* **************************************************************************
* Copyright (C) 2005 VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved
* **************************************************************************
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
* by the Free Software Foundation version 2.1 and no later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
* WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
* or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
* for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
* with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
* 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
*/

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 6:58 UTC (Wed) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

Sorry, I completely lost track of what this thread was about.

Never mind that comment, it was regarding the TOOLS, not kernel modules.

VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software

Posted Sep 12, 2007 9:10 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

It is a contradiction. If they hand it out, it can obviously be not confidental.