VMware Says Academic Program Attracting Schools, Releases Tools as Open Source
Virtual infrastructure software company VMware says that more than 300 schools are now participating in its free Academic Program, which provides products, resources, and source code at no cost to schools for research and publication.
Qualifying schools, such as Boston University, Cornell, Duke, MIT and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, provide instructors with technology resources that help them instruct students on software development.
"I have used VMware software in my operating systems courses for several years, so that students can safely develop kernel-level policies and mechanisms in a virtual machine environment without disrupting the underlying host operating system," said Richard West, associate professor of Computer Science Department at Boston University, in a prepared statement. "In the same regard, VMware software provides a convenient sandbox for rapidly prototyping novel system ideas as part of our ongoing research."
VMware also sells its products and services at a discount to higher education and K-12 schools for user in their campus IT infrastructure.
This news comes at VMware released most of its VMware Tools as open source. The tools are a suite of guest operating system virtualization components geared to improve Vmware virtual machine performance and management.
VMware is aiming to ease Linux integration for its distribution partners with the open source tools by easing porting to new operating systems, increasing user involvement in test and development and fostering innovation. To that end, Linux vendors can now integrate open-source-based VMware Tools -- hosted at Sourceforce.net -- into future versions of their OSes.
VMware is working with vendors such as Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu to integrate open-source VMware Tools into their operating system installation processes.
"By working with the open source community, VMware has cleared the way for Linux distributors to integrate VMware Tools within the operating system," said Paul Poppleton, senior staff IT engineer at Qualcomm, in a prepared statement. "This gives us and other companies a significantly more streamlined path in deploying and updating in-guest components. In fact, deploying a Linux guest operating system will be as simple as installing the guest--no additional steps required."
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David Kopf is a freelance technology writer and marketing consultant, and can be reached at [email protected].