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VMware has made Open Virtual Machine Tools available with a GPL license. OVMT is an open source version of most of the code for VMware Tools for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.

VMware continues to explain how the open source version differs from the commercial version in the FAQ:

Our goal is to work towards making the open source version as close to the commercial version as possible. However, we do currently make use of certain components licensed from third parties as well as components from other VMware products which are only available in binary form

Interesting move by VMware, as it really isn't that long ago that users were not even allowed to redistribute VMware tools pre-installed inside their virtual appliances. It will be very interesting to see what improvements the open source community will bring to the table as people start hacking the code.

Exciting, but I have one question: What happens if the OVMT over time ends up being a better product than the original VMware tools? Specifically, what happens with the Windows version of VMware tools if OVMT gets improvements released under the GPL that the Windows version would benefit from? VMware can't port the code back to the non-gpl version and only release it in a binary form now can they?

VMware has updated their VMware Tools EULA, effective immediately. This change makes it legal to redistribute the VMware Tools package inside a pre-packaged appliance as long as the base OS is Linux. This is a welcomed change that should make it easier to pre-package the tools package inside distributed appliances.

This change does not, however, allow the tools to be redistributed in an appliance running on Microsoft Windows, but the legal implications of redistributing an appliance with a Windows base is far more involved than just the VMware tools package.

I wonder what Microsoft is really thinking with regards to distributed appliances. It's a market they seem to be totally ignoring so far, which really isn't surprising as none of the Microsoft licensing models would allow people to create appliances, based on Windows, for redistribution.