Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

VMWare Server is FREE (but not open source)

This should be interesting as it plays out in the market. In one corner you have Xen… coming out of nowhere with a left hook “we’re going to be the open source hypervisor virtualization standard” with RHEL, SLES, and just about every distro adopting it as the “standard” hypervisor for the future.

In the other corner VMWare (the current standard) hits back with an upper cut Free version of VMWare Server hoping to stave off Xen’s momentum.

Who will win? I honestly don’t know. There are arguments MySQL isn’t really “free” even though the source is available. It remains to be seen whether these “free” versions of products threatened by open source offerings give customers, developers, and users enough that they will opt not to choose the open source alternatives. Long term I don’t know, but I’ll bet in the short term, this may prove to be a very savvy move by VMWare.