SAN FRANCISCO – VMware recently hired open source industry veteran Chip Childers to be its chief open source officer, continuing what has been a years-long process by the vendor to elevate its perception in the highly critical open source community.

Childers came to VMware after a brief stint as chief architect at Puppet Labs, which was acquired in April by Perforce Software. More prominently, Childers spent nearly seven years at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, serving initially as CTO and later as executive director.

In his new role, Childers is tasked with shepherding VMware's ongoing involvement in open source projects, elevating awareness of VMware’s participation in that space, and helping to better integrate open source across the vendor.

Childers explained in an interview at the recent VMware Explore 2022 event that his main focus is on VMware’s research and innovation group, where he oversees that group’s open source technology center. This includes engineers that are tasked with initiating VMware’s involvement in an open source project.

Much of this work takes advantage of VMware’s cloud-native efforts around its Kubernetes-based Tanzu portfolio. That portfolio took off at VMware following the vendor’s buying spree of open source-focused companies, including Heptio, Bitnami, and Pivotal. That Heptio deal brought on two of the main inventors of the Kubernetes project – Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie – who have both recently left VMware.

“VMware has been on a journey,” Childers said. “And I think it had gotten to a point where its level of sophistication as an organization is much greater than, and this is an area where we are spending time to try to help here, public perception maybe isn't at the same level right now as what VMware is actually doing.”

Childers noted his work is also focused on further operationalizing VMware's cloud efforts into sound business models.

“My personal goal here is to make sure that I'm able to help this business, across the portfolio, elevate the level of strategic understanding of both the potential, the risks, and then how to have better outcomes in using and participating around open source,” Childers said.

More broadly, Childers said this work plays into VMware’s “three pillar” approach to how it engages and manages its open source interactions.

The other two pillars include internal compliance with open source software in terms of its consumption and contributions toward the community, and the vendor’s connection to cloud projects that it either draws from for strategic services or projects that it’s the primary steward of in maintaining. Childers cited Carvel lifecycle management tools that are part of the Tanzu platform as an example.

“In partnership with the product teams, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative health assessment of all of those projects in order to help make sure that those that are third-party owned, part of a foundation, or from other vendors, or our own projects, are in a healthy state,” Childers explained. “Then we work with the product teams in situations where perhaps there's improvement that can be made.”

Those improvements can be through the investment “in people, in dollars, in awareness, and we leverage our partnerships in order to maintain the health of the project.”

“One of the things that is very important to VMware and that I'm working on increasing the level of sophistication around is being intentional, and then being transparent about that intention and making sure that that intention is respecting the time and the value the community is providing in a way that we're just very good citizens,” Childers said. “Sometimes that means don't open source something. Sometimes it means absolutely, go for it and build a community and invest appropriately to make sure that that's successful, that participants feel welcome and that they get a symbiotic relationship with us.”

That transparency also leads toward bolstering VMware’s perception in the open source space. Former CEO Pat Gelsinger summed up that perception at the vendor’s VMworld event in 2019 with a single word: “bad.”

“I think that was a visible turning point,” Childers said of Gelsinger’s terse statement. “That reflected what had been an ongoing evolution of the company to embrace what frankly the entire industry has no choice but to embrace. … At this point VMware is much further along the journey as when it first started, it's further along from when it was very public about it, and yet we have so far to go and so much potential.”

VMware and Childers’ intent also looks set to counter moves by its competitors in the market.

Cisco, for instance, took a similar tack last year when it hired Stephen Augustus as its head of open source. Augustus, coincidently, previously served as an open source engineer at VMware, having been absorbed into that vendor through its Heptio acquisition.

And Red Hat has been very vocal in stating its involvement in and reliance on open source software. That focus was directly related to IBM eventually purchasing Red Hat for $34 billion.

Childers also expressed optimism about potential changes that could come to VMware should its controversial $69 billion acquisition by Broadcom come to pass.

“I personally embrace that change because in times of change there's a ton of opportunity,” Childers said. “The reality is that across the portfolio, open source, open development, open standards, and even potentially open data represents a materially important part of our product strategy and our technology strategy.”

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.