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FreeMWare Renamed 'plex86'
Joey Lawrance writes, "FreeMWare, the LGPL'd replacement for VMWare, has a new name: plex86. From their site: 'The new name "plex86" is derived from the (pseudo)words multiplex and x86. Many users had requested a new name; one that is short, easy to remember, and directly relates to the function of the software.'" It's been less than a year since FreeMWare's first mention on Slashdot; looks like they've made great progress since then in creating a free/Free multi-OS platform. If you're interested in contributing (including documentation), they're looking for you.
The differences are actually quite fundamental in nature. VMWare exists and works. FreeMWare/Plex86 doesn't do either. But it's free, so it must be better.
Did these guys really do their research before renaming themselves? Ericsson already has a programming language called "Plex" (used on their AXE exchange switches). I expect they own the trademark (etc) on it too; although I don't know for sure. Anyway - you'd have to expect problems in the future. Poor choice by the FreeMWare guys.
Actually, according to someone I know who was an intellectual property lawyer, numbers, while not registerable as trademarks in themselves, are sufficient to cause conflict between one company's trademark and another's in the same area of business. E.g., if I have a car called the "Bob 9-3", Saab may be able to claim (at least in the US) that it infringes on the registered trademark "Saab 9-3". In fact[IANAL&TIAUA (I am not a lawyer, and this is an unverified anecdote.)]:
It seems that when IBM changed the name of the System/3 family to AS/400, they had to pay an undisclosed sum to the current sole holder of a registered trademark consisting of a sequence of letters followed by the digits 400, used to refer to automatic data processing equipment. Care to guess what "automatic data processing equipment" they were talking about?
The Atari 400.
How's that for funny?
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
How many would you like? It all depends on your definition of rapid really. Open Source software doesn't reach user-level release as fast as commercial software, but it becomes feature-comparable much earlier and useable by those willing to get their hands dirty _far_ faster.
In terms of quality products, it is hard to deny software such as PHP, Apache, The linux kernel, perl, yadda yadda, all the usual stuff. However none of these can really be considered "rapid" from start, they all started quite some time ago.
Most really rapid initial Open Source development can never be quoted, since it usually consists of a large number of developers abandoning a previous implementation and starting again from scratch. Much of the good Open Source software you see now has gone through at least one phase of being heavily re-written, almost or sometimes literally from the ground up, in an astounding amount of time, but because nobody clocked it, or changed the name, it just turns up as the latest release.
However I think there are some, smaller, cases of applications that appears almost from nowhere. The various linux napster clients for instance. One moment I had just heard of napster, the next their protocol was reverse engineered and two or three Open Source versions of the client appeared.
Similarly with email software. Sendmail, king of the hill for so long now, was looking pretty much invincible, then qmail came out, and suddenly what had looked like something that was good enough seemed somehow tarnished. No dust on Sendmail, I use it, and love it, but many don't, and a slew of new email servers have appeared recently, qmail and exim being two of the notable mentions.
I am unwilling to stand up and say "Look, under any circumstances, Open Source software will develop a complete application faster than a Commercial method would", for a start there are different levels of interest in various types of applications, and for second, theres a mindhsare capture thing. Commercial places just hire their employees, Open Source projects have to attract their developers, and that takes a bit of time, especially as you have to get exponentially more than those of a commercial project in order to make up for the (at least inital) fact that nobody is working on it full time.
However I think that Apache, PHP, Linux and many others are undeniable proof that once that mindshare of developers is attained, development is unbelievably fast. Just watching the kernel mailing list for a week is enough to make one dizzy, and you don't see a 10th of what is going on.
When I was doing one of my own projects, I really noticed that speed-up effect after the initial block was over. TDT took two weeks to get to something vaguely working, another one to get to something that looked fairly ok and had the major engine working, and then within a week enormous improvements were made, contributions even by the few people who were interested in it made a huge difference, lighting, explosions, tuning of coloring, models, rewrites of parts of the engine to support effects like waves and menus, I was making releases less than hourly on the evenings I was working on it.
I don't think we have yet seen the true power of the Open Source development method, but places like Source Forge and tools like CVS and autoconf are slowly pushing their way into the fore, making things go quicker and quicker and quicker. I look forward to the future.
You can't win a fight.
Another possible reason for the name change is because it sounds so similar to VMWare. To avoid legal problems in the future, they changed the name.
I should also mention that FreeMWare/plex86 is not a hardware emulator. It allows you to virtualize the x86 chip through software to run multiple operating systems on one CPU, even though the x86 architecture has no hardware virtualization. This is similar to what you can do on mainframes like the IBM S/390, although on a much smaller scale (I doubt anyone could run over 4,000 instances of Linux on an x86 chip).
It's actually explained right on their web site. "The goal of the FreeMWare project is to create an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine".
If you want hardware emulation, check out Bochs, which was written by one of the founding authors of FreeMWare/plex86.