VMware's signalled a new push into open source by advertising for a Director, Open Source Programs.

The ad for the gig says it will live in a “newly-formed Chief Development Officer (CDO) organization” and “shape how VMware views, contributes to, and relates to F/OSS communities.”

That's "F/OSS" as in Free-slash-open-source. Or just FOSS for the rest of us.

Whoever gets the job will be charged with tasks including “build an engineering program around F/OSS Best Practices” and “Driving increased, more successful VMware contribution to F/OSS projects.”

The successful applicant will also have “Advising senior leaders within VMware on F/OSS strategy” on their to-do list, along with representing the company at the Linux Foundation.

“Evangelizing better cultural awareness of F/OSS within VMware” is also in the job description, as is "Advising VMware teams who want to release some or all of their products under F/OSS licenses on how to build and sustain vibrant F/OSS projects."

VMware's recently decided its cloud-native applications efforts, the lightweight container OS Photon and container security effort Lightwave, should be open source. The company's long offered a free hypervisor, but this excursion into open source looks to be rather more ambitious.

How ambitious? As it happens, The Register's virtualisation desk is meeting CTO for cloud-native apps Kit Colbert later this week. We'll ask him then.

One thing we do know VMware is working on is a new version of vSphere, as the restricted beta we learned of in February has now been revealed to a wider audience.

If you're keen, apply here, then brace for terms and conditions that require you to install the beta within three days of it being made available, provide feedback within four weeks and completing homework set by VMware to test the new code.

The name of the new release (we're tipping vSphere 6.5) remains obscure, as do its headline features as beta testers are also asked to sign confidentiality agreements. ®