VMWare takes on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) market with CloudFoundry, a publicly available infrastructure for application development, available under an open-source license.
The platform's openness is what makes CloudFoundry differ from other PaaS offerings on the market (such as Microsoft's Azure, Amazon's Beanstalk or Google's App Engine). The code is freely available (and tweakable under a liberal Apache 2.0 license) and it works with Java, Ruby on Rails and Node.js while running on Ubuntu.
CloudFoundry is currently available as a free beta, while VMWare also plans to release Micro Cloud, a free download for developers wanting a single instance personal PaaS on their local machine.
Go CloudFoundry
