I'm generally ignorant on open-vm-tools and vmware as a hypervisor, so please forgive me for asking questions that may seem obvious.

There are really 2 things that are being raised here in this bug, and
I'd like for them to be addressed separately.
a.) Inclusion in Ubuntu main (moving from multiverse).
   This brings maintenance cost to ubuntu with respect to security
   updates to open-vm-tools, and increases the support lifetime of this
   package for Ubuntu.

   Note also that typically packages move from universe to main.
   Why was this package in multiverse originally?  That is normally
   an indication of unsupportability due to licensing.

   Other than increased burden on Ubuntu developers for support, 
   there is very little difference between main and Universe to a user.

b.) Inclusion in the cloud image
   This increases the footprint of the cloud image by ~ 3MB for the
   package itself.  As it is packaged in saucy right now, it also
   carries significant dependencies due to its 'recommends' that result
   in 28M of footprint.  Installed with '--no-install-recommends'
   would change that to only 'zerofree' as the additional dependency.
   If that is a true dependency, you will also have to file a MIR for
   that package.

   Additionally, the inclusion in the cloud image means that users of
   this cloud image on other hypervisors are: 
    - possibly vulnerable to security issues found in this package or its
      dependencies.
    - have increased memory footprint if any persistent processes are
      run by the package.
    - have unnecessary disk and network IO as a result of 'apt-get
      upgrade' for updates to these unecessary packages.

Above I see the following statements from John and Ben:

> - When Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system, users get
>   the best out-of-box experience to efficiently deploy virtual machines
>   on VMware virtual infrastructure.

"best out of box experience" doesn't really tell me anything.

> - Eliminates the need to separately install VMware Tools when
>   Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system because
>   Open-VM-Tools is a fully supported open source implementation of
>   VMware Tools.

What I asked was why would we want them in the images.  Clearly if the
user is going to install a package and that package is already
installed, its a win for that user.  That argument applies to Xorg or
libre-office though, and I'm not going to include them in the cloud
images based on that argument.

> - Reduces operational expenses and virtual machine downtime because
>   updates to Open-VM-Tools packages are provided with the operating
>   system maintenance updates and patches. This eliminates separate
>   maintenance cycles for VMware Tools updates.

We already have this through our security updates and SRU process, and
the fact that the open-vm-tools are in universe.  Nothing here changes
if we include the tools in main or in the cloud image.

> - No compatibility matrix checking required for Open-VM-Tools.
>   Adhering to vSphere compatibility matrix for the guest OS release is
>   sufficient.

I'm sorry, but I really dont know what that means.  How does inclusion
in Ubuntu main change this ?  How does inclusion in the cloud image
(versus installation after the fact) change this?

> - Open-VM-Tools bundled with the operating system provides a compact
>   foot-print optimized for each OS release.

open-vm-tools is already bundled for the Ubuntu operating system.  It is
available in universe.  Nothing really changes here by including in main
or in the image itself.

> 
> - tools for the images and guest information which is reported to the
>   hypervisor. For ESXi and clouds based on VMware, this will give the
>   hypervisor the ability to modfiy the guest.

I explicitly do not like "the ability to modify the guest".  I'm very
much adverse to Microsoft's attempt at the same thing in walinux-agent,
giving their hypervisor the ability to run arbitrary code as root inside
the instance.  I think this is unsupportable design and do not want to
facilitate it.

I could be reading too far into the statement there, I'm not sure.