I had just downloaded FreeBSD 7.0 and I wondered if I could use it as a VMWare host. A quick visit to www.vmware.com taught me it is not supported. However, a lot of stuff can run on BSD in linux compat mode.

Google pointed me to a VMWare forum where someone had started a thread to ask VMWare to add support for FreeBSD. That thread had received about 100+ replies, in 3 years time. Someone complained that 100 posts over 3 years time should be enough to convince VWMare to do this.

Yeah right.

Let's look at the math: 100 possible customers for FreeBSD. But a lot of VMWare customers don't need more than the free version of VMWare server. I use it in our poduction envirnoment as well. I have no need for the 'for pay' features. So VMWare doesn't make money from those people.

Then there are a lot of unix sysadmins which posted that they would like to use BSD, but were using linux because they couldn't. Supporting BSD would add no value for VMWare, since those admins are already using it, but on another platform. Again VMWare doesn't make money.

But what does it cost to support BSD?

A lot. Each version of the VMWare product would need to get the same amount of QA testing and analysis. This is horribly expensive for shrink wrapped software which is used in business critical environments. And there is also the cost of maintaining the different code versions.

It will cost VMWare a ton of money to support BSD hosts, at the risk of damaging their name if problems arise, all for maybe a couple of licenses that they would probably have sold anyway, but for a different host.

As much as I would like this, ultimately businesses exist to make money, not to be nice. Being nice is only done when it adds measurable value. IBM does not support linux on their servers because they are nice people. They do it because they sell hardware and servers, and if a large number of important customers demands linux, that is what they will get.