Hi!
Does anybody know anything about the FreeMWare project which was started in 1999 by Kevin Lawton?
As I know it was an attempt to make an OpenSource version of VMware. What did happen to the project? Is there any code of FreeMWare?
Thanks in advance!

What for? there are plenty opensource virtualization products

Thanks!
I've found an article about virtualization techniques for the Intel architecture and how to overcome difficulties with the 17 non-virtualizable instructions in its instruction set here:
http://www.floobydust.com/virtualiza...awton_1999.txt
The author (Kevin Lawton) wanted to implement the ideas in FreeMWare and the other reason is that I wanted to see the code of VMware. Where can I find an OpenSource version of VMware?

vmware is not opensource, even though it freely uses opensource components. If you want a truly open solution, start looking at kvm (linux-kvm.org) and xen

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Thanks for your help!

I had a conversation with my colleague, just the other day, about this very topic.

Some background:
I've been using VMware since the beginning, literally. I still have the installer for workstation version 1.x.
While I was amazed at the power of the new-fangled VMware thing, I of course wanted to find a free/open version of it.
That's when I stumbled across the Freemware project and bochs.

Now, to answer your question:
Freemware was an open source spinoff of bochs, by Kevin Lawton in 1999.
It was renamed to "plex86" in 2000.
Bochs was a closed source product until MandrakeSoftware bought it in 2003 and LGPL'd it. Bochs and plex86 development could now happen in tandem.
I am unsure of the date, but shortly after, the combined efforts of bochs and plex86 were rolled into a new project, QEMU.
Oracle's VirtualBox, a very popular VMware Workstation alternative, was built around QEMU.
The names bochs, freemware, and plex86 are now in the dustbin of history. Those projects no longer exist. However, the efforts still live on.

As I am writing this in Feb 2024, QEMU is still under very active development. Virtualbox is still under very active development. The open source hypervisor space: QEMU, Virtualbox, Xen, KVM... all in development, all working in tandem. And in the end, we owe much gratitude to Kevin Lawton and the various development teams around bochs that made it all happen.