VMWare announced that will open its high-end ESX Server APIs and make the ESX source code available to partners. 

The background to this story is apparently Computer Associates, whose next-generation Unicenter promises to manage all sorts of virtualized environments. It supposedly approached VMware for a hall pass on royalties if their widgetry snapped together.  VMware was reportedly willing, but its lawyers did not like the special terms for CA, which is how VMware supposedly came by the new empowerment program it calls VMware Community Source.

Inspired by recent trends, its partners are supposed to get access to ESX source under a royalty-free license and make their wishes known through a collaborative development model that involves an architecture board.

Though it's been suggested that only a few of them will get any real advantage from it, VMware said that it was working with CA, AMD, BEA, BMC, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Novell, QLogic and Red Hat in the name of advancing open virtualization standards.

VMware may be anticipating that move because it says it will contribute an existing framework of interfaces called Virtual Machine Hypervisor Interfaces (VMHI) that are based on its products to facilitate the development of what it calls Open Hypervisor standards in an "industry-neutral manner."

It says consistent adoption of open interfaces should facilitate interoperability and supportability across heterogeneous virtualized environments.