VMWare has announced a surprising move. They are releasing an Open Source version of the of their VMWare View client, called VMWare View Open Client. Why has VMWare moved towards open source?

The simple reason is they are starting to feel some of the squeeze from Microsoft, Citrix and others. Budgets are tight and organizations are looking for a reason to choose one vendor over another. Microsoft is still ramping up its Virtualization suite and until this is complete they cannot provide effective management of the virtual environments. This gives VMWare some time to try and solidify their position in the VDI market.

By pushing the open source route VMWare hopes to achieve more extensions of the product to suite more client types. Maybe we’ll will see a Linux VDI platform from VMWare as well.

The VMWare View Open client will only support a basic functionality set including:

• SSL tunnel ability
• two factor authentication support
• command line interface

USB redirection, multiple monitor and multimedia support are not. But lets face it if you are moving down the VDI path you want centralized control and management first and are not that concerned about the end user experience. You certainly do not want to allow users to do general web surfing and have probably blocked anything fun.

VDI certain has some cool features, but I still believe if you have a fat client on your desk then you should use it as such.

Will this move be enough to protect VMWare from the challengers? Only time will tell.

You can get the code here.

What do you think?