VMWare joins the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member

Opinion

Mar 07, 2017

Linux Open Source

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.”