The company hired Dirk Hohndel to lead its open source efforts last year. Joining the Linux Foundation shows that VMware is going even deeper into the open source world.rn VMware, the company known for changing the datacenter landscape with virtualization, has joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold member. This is the second highest membership tier at The Linux Foundation. “VMware has underscored its commitment to the principles of open source development,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “The open source community will benefit from VMware’s wealth of talent and resources as we collaborate to solve technology challenges from the data center to cloud infrastructure and beyond.” VMWare has been involved with open source for a very long time. In 2011, the company created Cloud Foundry, the fully open source platform as a service (PaaS) project. In 2015, Cloud Foundry became a Linux Foundation collaborative project. Today, Cloud Foundry is to PaaS what Linux is to the server. It’s a very critical technology for modern IT infrastructure. In addition to Cloud Foundry, VMware is also involved with other open source projects, including Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Open vSwitch and OpenStack. In 2016, Dirk Hohndel, formerly chief Linux and open source technologist at Intel, joined VMWare as vice president and chief open source officer. Hohndel’s arrival at VMware meant that the company was going to adopt and aggressively embrace Linux and open source. VMware joining the Linux Foundation is apparently a result of Hohndel’s efforts. In an earlier interview, Hohndel told me, “VMware today has a strong investment in open source and already is contributing to a large number of existing open source projects. And increasingly we are driving our own open source projects in order to create solutions for our customers that allow them to take advantage of the production-quality infrastructure that they are used to from VMWare, together with fast-moving open source software that so often defines the ‘new normal’ in cloud computing.” Can we now expect more technologies being open sourced by VMware, including VMware Player for Linux? Related content opinion These are the most exciting Linux powered devices Did you know that Tesla cars ran on Linux?rn By Swapnil Bhartiya May 22, 2017 4 mins Linux Open Source opinion How Rackspace flew through turbulence in the private cloud Bryan Thompson, General Manager, OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace, talked about the second generation of cloud and some turbulence that OpenStack recently experienced.rn By Swapnil Bhartiya May 22, 2017 4 mins Open Source Cloud Computing Data Center opinion How Dell’s Project Sputnik came to life I met and talked to Barton George, the projectu2019s initiator and leader, to understand the backstory. By Swapnil Bhartiya May 22, 2017 10 mins Linux Open Source Computers and Peripherals opinion Elementary OS is trying to create a business model for open source app developers There is no dearth of Linux based operating systems, you will find dime a dozen. However there are only a few major ones that matter and elementary OS is among them. rn By Swapnil Bhartiya May 20, 2017 4 mins Linux Open Source Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe