Open-VM-Tools vs VMware-Tools
The VMware Tools package that ships with VMware products contains both open source and closed source components. The Open VM Tools packages is just the open source subset of the VMware Tools package. In general, you can expect that Open VM Tools will provide the same basic features that VMware Tools does, but there may be a few extra things that VMware Tools includes. Also, if your Linux distribution has a VMware Tools package in its repositories, it is based on Open VM Tools and not VMware Tools.
UPDATE: Earlier I was reluctant to be specific about what code was in open-vm-tools vs VMware Tools because the set changes. That's still true, but I found a list from the open-vm-tools website, so I though I would include that here.
The open-vm-tools FAQ says the following about what code it contains vs VMWare Tools:
All of the non-experimental kernel modules and user level applications that have been developed solely by VMware are being released. Certain experimental drivers are planned for future release. VMware will encourage 3rd parties to release their contributions under the GPL.
More specifically:
- Drivers for devices and filesystems access
- Memory ballooning
- Shared folders
- Drag and Drop, Text and File Copy/Paste
- Clipboard sharing
- Disk wiping and shrinking
- Time synchronization
- Automatic guest screen resolution resizing
- GuestInfo (provides statistics about guest environment)
- Guest SDK (provides information about the VM)
- Soft power operations
- Multiple monitor support
- GTK Toolbox UI
Again, this set changes over time. As new functionality is released via VMware Tools, it may take some time for it to find it's way to open-vm-tools, or it may not make it there at all if VMware is unable to release it.
In recent versions of VMware, it recommends the use of open-vm-tools
This is the KB http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803
Which basically said:
VMware recommends using open-vm-tools redistributed by operating system vendors.
This of course based on the compatibility guide.
Modern Linux distros also includes VMware drivers directly in the kernel and VMware recommends and support this drivers.
VMware actively maintains the source code for VMware paravirtual drivers and kernel modules upstream in the mainline kernel.org tree for Linux.
So you can feel safe using open-vm-tools.