I've been using VMware server mainly for accessing Windows (sometimes I need MS Office or IE). VMware server is a very good product, but is also closed source, and very disconnected from the community.

Some of the source is open (such as vmmon & vmnet kernel modules), but still VMware don't cooperate with the FOSS community. This means that good people make patches to support newer kernel versions, but they act like pirates. VMware won't apply their patches. VMware can't work out-of-the-box on kernels since ~2.6.21 or so.

Same goes with a more minor, X <-> GTK <-> VMware bug I've been writing about. It might be a non-VMware bug but something in Xorg. But I'd expect them to figure it out and post a message or even help to fix the Xorg bug, if it's an Xorg bug. Instead, they either ignore our requests or tell that we use non supported distros. Which is true. But if the problem is Xorg7.3 integration, they'd better fix it, because RHEL 6 would probably use it as well. Same goes for new kernel versions.

Both bugs are being neglected by VMware for more than a year.

So screw them, I chose a community supported virtualization solution: VirtualBox Open Source Edition. Debian has a kernel module package for each kernel versions, and stuff looks much better so far.
I'd suggest VMware to hire a single FOSS guy for Linux integration and "community special tasks". He'll be very busy, but I think that this is all it takes to change their "community involvement" upside-down.

Update: been using it for few days, VirtualBox is cool 😉