[ Thanks to relic for this link.
]
“VMware has announced it is making its virtual machine file
format freely available, with no license or royalties.“Despite the company’s claim that ‘it is committed to supporting
any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by
customers and working toward converging on open standards in this
area,’ this announcement is clearly motivated by the desire to
ensure that VMware’s virtualisation technologies are at the hub of
a healthy ecosystem of third parties offering a range of
value-added capabilities, such as backup/recovery, provisioning,
performance optimistation, and so forth…”