They do. Those who builds and sells the stuff that VMware runs on has tech centers set up just to support Linux. IBM and whatever ended up in HP probably spent

They do. Those who builds and sells the stuff that VMware runs on has tech centers set up just to support Linux. IBM and whatever ended up in HP probably spent hundreds of million (or more) to make sure Linux runs on anything anywhere. You don't have to spend that on writing an operating system that could run on select hardware at best, you can leverage their work and run on commodity hardware, for free. Thanks to the reciprocity of the license they can do this with the guarantee that their competitors will do the same. VMware did rip out the drivers from Linux and use in their own closed product, which is then guaranteed to run anything with no further work required. They argue, and this may very well be so, that since they wrote a binary shim between the Linux stuff and their own they are two separate products. They can therefore release the source of the shim only. While that's clearly against the spirit of the licensors (which they have made abundantly clear over the years), it will be very interesting to see if it also is against the letter of the law.