Most of VMware virtualization code was stolen from kvm and they never were punished. Our laws are a joke, our courts are largely illegitimate and so to is our government.
VMwware sure as hell did not invent the hypervisor, and we were damn careful not to ever claim that. The early unique IP was how to enable a hypervisor to use dynamic translation where required to work around non-virtualizable x86 instructions, we also did well with how to package a hypervisor to run on a host/share host devices etc. Over time that early differentiation went away as we helped encourage CPU vendors to include better hardware virtualization support. And the other big thing we had was just a market focus/desire to deliver value/delight nerdy users like ourselves.
Who is the granddaddy of hypervisors? It sure ain't KVM, and it sure ain't VMware. That would be IBM. They had decades of doing hypervisors on the mainframe when we were getting started as a tiny startup. They sure know a lot about hypervisors and had a x86 hypervisor research project in Watson labs. We were humbled when IBM fellow Rich Oehler came to us wanting to partner because he saw how far ahead we were. That was years before KVM even got started. The IBM collaboration, lead to years of great work with IBM, who helped VMwware get going with ESX Server. Although the focus of VMware since founding was always to end up focusing on the data center/server market we could not have done that so well and so fast without IBM and sales and GTM cooperation.
Now good on KVM and others for pushing open hypervisor technology, and any company in this space who actually cares about their users and customers. I hope KVM helps pound VMware/Broadcom into the dirt.
Edit: typos
I was a VMware workstation user in the late 90s.
I worked on the VMware monitor team back in 2007-2008, which probably put my employee number way in the 1000s. Ole Agesen, Carl Waldspurger, and other early folks were still there.
Back then "kvm" meant a remote keyboard/video/mouse device. Linux kvm was announced in 2006, and released in 2007, and required hardware virtualization, which was first released with AMD Pacifica in 2006. Back then VMware's binary translation was locked up in patents, so in the free software world we had Xen, colinux, and other hacks.
So for all you can say, VMware released a product to market that provided a server-based hypervisor before any of their competitors. They're not the first hypervisor, but they're the first server-based hypervisor for X86.
One of the nice things about vSphere in a lab environment was the ease of moving VMs between Workstation/Fusion and ESXi, and prior to the Broadcom acquisition, pricing for the desktop and entry-level server products was reasonable, including free products, generous evaluations, and perpetual licensing with update-only subscriptions.