Announced Wednesday, VMware joins current Linux Foundation members including Adobe, AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel and Motorola.

"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," VMware vice president of emerging products and solutions Dan Chu said in a statement. "We are delighted to become a member of The Linux Foundation and look forward to making future contributions to the Linux community."

VMware's participation in the Linux community includes contributing its Virtual Machine Interface, a paravirtualization interface as an open specification. Paravirtualization is communication between the hypervisor and the guest operating system where the guest operating system can indicate its intent to the hypervisor allowing better cooperation and performance when running in a virtual machine.

The company will subsequently collaborate in the Linux kernel community to developing a "source-level paravirtualization interface (or paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel," according to the Linux Foundation.

A long purveyor of collaboration, in 2007, VMware released its Open Virtual Machine Tools, an open source VMware Tools implementation, and announced the open-vm-tools project to enable community participation.

In July, VMware launched the Release Candidate 1 version of VMware Server 2.0 (vmware.com/beta/server/), its second-generation virtualization server, to compete with industry heavyweights such as Microsoft that released its Hyper-V virtualization software in June.