The title is misleading. I get the feeling that everyone who upvoted this submission, did so reflexively without ever visiting the article.

VMWare is open sourcing VMware View, a product intended for thin client manufacturers.

Yeah, this software isn't that exciting; it looks like rdesktop with a few added features.

Is there any reason to check this out? I've been using virtualbox for a while and can't think of any reason to stop.

Did you even bother to read the article?

They're open sourcing VMWare View (formerly called VMWare VDI) not VMWare Workstation. View is thin client software for remote desktop delivery.

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

No I didn't, which is why I asked the question I asked. I guess I didn't know that vmware made stuff other than virtual machine software.

VMWare's brands within brands within brands continue to confuse me.

I'm hoping at some point this leads to a client for OS X and/or X11 that can talk to ESXi and VMWare Server. At the moment you have to manually configure each VM to expose a VNC-compatible server, or run the VMWare Windows client inside cough a VM.

I'm sure VMware has been studying netscape vs microsoft with a very good spyglass and they've decided to let this trial balloon go up to see if they can harness the oss community to help them out.

It's very much appreciated that they did this, let's hope that they will do more!

No, FOSS developers will not help much because the product is VMWare View. It's specifically for thin client makers.

yes, I realized that. I see this as a 'trial balloon', if it works for them I would hope that they will release more.

This is not in anyway a trial with open source software. FOSS developers work on software that they're familiar with. I doubt very many of them own thin client hardware. They also don't like proprietary software and on the other end of this client is VMWare's closed-source server software.

VMWare is open sourcing this product because thin clients tend to run on exotic hardware and they want to allow manufacturers to easily port and install their client. That ensures that they'll be locked into VMWare's server product.

Does anyone have experience with this? How much does this overlap with the BaseShield ( http://baseshield.com/ ) offering?