Once again, quietly and behind the scenes, it looks like VMware has acquired another company without so much as a splash.  This time, it looks like Tungsten Graphics was acquired last month for an undisclosed amount.  Tungsten Graphics reports on their Web site:

November 26, 2008: Tungsten Graphics has been acquired by VMware. Open source graphics technology development will continue as part of VMware's engineering team.

Tungsten Graphics is the company behind Mesa, the TTM memory manager, Gallium3D and other Linux graphics technology. 

On the company's Web site, the following FAQ describes things:

Has TG been acquired? Yes, VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics on November 26, 2008. The addition of the TG team will augment VMware's ability to deliver industry-leading 3D graphics virtualization capabilities.

How does VMware fit into the landscape of open source graphics? VMware has had a history of developing technology to enable graphics capabilities to guest software running in VMware virtual machines. This work includes special drivers that are optimized for VMware's virtual hardware, that consequently offer better performance and additional features such as arbitrary screen resizing and multihead support. The video driver was released as open source in 2002, with development done upstream in X.org's git repository.

What does this mean for my open source driver project? Gallium makes it much easier to create 3D drivers that support multiple API's on multiple operating systems and utilize multiple GPU architectures. Our team will continue to drive the Gallium infrastructure forward and keep it up to date with the latest advances occuring in the graphics arena. The means your Gallium based driver project will benefit from these enhancements.