In an interesting article on The Register, they write about their most recent interview with VMware's CEO Diane Greene that took place in VMware's new "waterfall room"... and while the idea of the waterfall room is interesting and amusing, it isn't the main part of this article.  They write:

This is all a long way of saying that VMware tolerates nonsense in its offices but not in its code. Greene flat out dismissed our proposal that the company fly the freak flag by open sourcing its flagship code.

"There is still a lot of innovation going into our hypervisor," Greene told us. "As long as there is a lot of innovation going in, (open source) is not the right model.

"What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you're purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff."

Greene also added that VMware readily shares its APIs with partners and gives away free versions of its best-selling server virtualization software.

We've long thought VMware's position as a proprietary software maker will hurt it eventually. Part of VMware's charm comes from adding flexibility in the data center and routing around Microsoft's locks. But should VMware's popularity and dominance only grow, the company would seem to resemble Microsoft more and more.

Egads, I hope Diane Greene doesn't catch this part of the article!  Telling her that her company resembles Microsoft more and more... can be, well, fighting words.  :)

I invite you to read the entire article, here.

And then for another take on things, you should also read Matt Asay's response to this article over at the CNET blog, here.

Wow. I guess for those who have yet to be forced to compete with open source, it's permissible to come out with grossly inaccurate comments about open source. Even Microsoft would never say something like this, which Diane Greene (VMware's CEO) said to The Register: