VMware is open to open source

VMware Vice President and Chief Open Source Officer Dirk Hohndel believes VMware and the open source community share a common commitment to collaboration that results in engineering excellence.

Hohndel, one of the pioneering leaders of open source, says he sees many signs that the relationship is growing even stronger. “Since I’ve joined VMware,” Hohndel says, “I think that we, as a company, have changed our approach, our thinking about open source. We are much more engaged in the broader open source community.”

Synergy and new solutions

Hohndel believes that driving this renewed engagement is a growing understanding of the benefits open source brings to VMware and the resources VMware can provide to the open source community.

“Open source is a fantastic way to create innovation, to move very quickly, to collaborate across companies,” Hohndel says. “But very often, open source projects don’t focus on enterprise-scale complexity, enterprise-class production readiness, and that is our specialty.”

Hohndel says that VMware sees a tremendous opportunity for both parties that a deeper synergy between VMware’s expertise in technology infrastructure and open source solutions can bring.

“Layering open source technology and the APIs it provides over the proven technology that VMware has been delivering for more than a decade is really a huge opportunity for our customers,” Hohndel says.

Open source is a fantastic way to create innovation, to move very quickly, to collaborate across companies, said Hohndel.

Passion and contributions

Synergy isn’t just about mutual benefit, but also mutual respect. “I think the open source community values VMware as a company that solves really complex problems in the context of enterprise data computing,” Hohndel says. And VMware is reciprocating that respect. “Overall, there’s a massive growth of engagement,” Hohndel says, “both with our own projects and with third-party projects.”

In November 2016, VMware introduced Project Clarity, an open source design system that combines UX guidelines, patterns, and front-end code in one solution. Project Clarity has frequently introduced new releases over the past year—evidence of the collaboration and innovation found in the open source community. More recently, VMware announced it is collaborating with Pivotal and Google Cloud to deliver production-ready Kubernetes for enterprises and service providers.

And thanks to the passion for collaboration and technological excellence that VMware and the open source community share, there’s plenty of room for this relationship to grow.