"While Fluid Operations' Java-based driver is only in the early stages, and is currently only read-only capable at this point, this represents some of the very first significant efforts by the independent Open Source community to provide interoperability with VMWare's standards.
"VMWare itself has only had a few exploratory forays into Open Source. In 2006 they opened their Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) which is used as the file container for all VMWare VMs. About a year ago, the company released Open-VM-Tools, the paravirtualization drivers for optimizing video, I/O, network and mouse operations within a VMWare virtual machine. VMWare recently announced VMWare View Open Client which enables Linux-based systems to connect to remote desktops, VMWare has also released the modifications to GPL/LGPL-licensed components used in their products, but has fallen short of actually open sourcing their ESX hypervisor, the crown jewel of the VMWare stack."
