SAN FRANCISCO, USA: The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux has announced that VMware has become a member of the Foundation.

The company joins existing Linux Foundation members and technology leaders such as Adobe, AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NEC, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat, among others.

“A growing number of organizations run their Linux environments on VMware virtualization, and the Linux Foundation gives us a collaborative forum to effectively address the needs of our customers,” said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and solutions at VMware. “We are delighted to become a member of The Linux Foundation and look forward to making future contributions to the Linux community.”

According to research firm IDC, revenue for the virtual machine software market may increase by more than four times from 2006-2011 to reach $4.8 billion by 2011. As adoption of Linux expands as a result of its natural position as a platform for next-generation computing in the cloud and in virtualized environments, companies such as VMware are looking to The Linux Foundation as the forum for collaboration.

VMware’s participation in the Linux community includes the contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a paravirtualization interface as an open specification, and subsequent collaboration with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of a source-level paravirtualization interface (paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel. In 2007, VMware announced the release of its Open Virtual Machine Tools, the open source implementation of VMware Tools, and the creation of the open-vm-tools project to enable community participation.

“Linux is a natural platform for virtualization and cloud computing. VMware is obviously a leader in that field and a leading ISV who has embraced the Linux platform,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “We’re excited to have VMware as our newest member.”

VMware has led the industry for the last decade in the breadth of operating systems supported by VMware virtualization, including all major Linux operating systems. VMware will work with the Linux Foundation and its members to address the increasing number of Linux users who are working with High Performance Computing (HPC), managed desktops, Web 2.0 technologies, and Software as a Service (SaaS) in virtualized environments.