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Sun Snags Open Source Virtualization Company, Innotek
BobB writes to mention Sun has acquired Innotek, open source desktop virtualization vendor. "VirtualBox will remain free of charge under Sun and be placed in the company's xVM portfolio of virtualization products, Steve Wilson, Sun's vice president of xVM, wrote in a blog posting. 'If we're going to continue to give it away, why is Sun investing in VirtualBox? In short, because the developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they're deployed," Wilson wrote in his blog. "We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine. Beyond that, I think there is a huge opportunity to link with Sun's other developer-related assets like NetBeans, Glassfish and (soon) MySQL.'"
Between what they've opened of their own - and the companies they've bought is anyone bigger in the open source realm?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
As a Vbox fan and user I welcome this move- I can see Virtualbox becoming a LOT more powerful in the medium to long-term future. Great performance virtualizing Sun products like Java and Eclipse would be sweet too. I like what Sun is doing in the opensource department, the OpenOffice 3 slide that turned up a few weeks ago looked very promising too!
Innotek... don't you mean Initech?
I don't like this company. I bought a shock collar for my lab and it was defective out of the box. They tried to charge me $45 to exchange it under warranty - on a brand new product. They put a little tag in the box that says you're not supposed to return it to the retailer and the retailer wouldn't take it back because of that. Not a good company. lol... True story, different company. How many of you suckers won't read this part of my complaint and just go off? ;-)
They buy fire insurance before they start moving desks and taking people's staplers.
Wake me up when they acquire Innotrode.
I bet they are hoppin' mad that THEY didn't acquire innotek just to "cockblock" others. I use VirtualBox, and it's presence in the repositories made most timely my new laptop purchase, considering vista was on it and it would have been more of a hassle for me to legally get xp.
VirtualBox is fantastic for me.
For those who say ms has "nothing to offer", they sort-of do, but I understand that it was their hope to malign Linux and Mac through the hope that MS WINDOWS would be the host, and that users would see windows as being more productive and feature-rich than the guest OS's offerings.
For me, it couldn't be further from truth. I run vista home premium in quarantine in VB, and I could care less that the vista NIC is by design/default NOT enabled. Why? no vista virus vector...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Does this mean there are likely to be Sun cloud facilities in the near future? Or is there one already? Sun cloud, too contradictory, how about Rainbow?
It would have been nice to have a link to Innotek and their product: VirtualBox. Which I am pretty sure is not associated with the dog training products that Google ranks at the top of its search.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
They should have updated their OS X version of VirtualBox more often. I just switched to dual-booting my Macbook Pro with Linux (dead easy with rEFIt and Ubuntu), and I'm never going back from having the full use of my Geforce 8600 GTS available in Portal.
I've read a lot on the opensolaris forums about getting VMWare to work on Solaris -but I think this move is more to their advantage. VMWare is a closed-source application that they'll never really have control over -even if VMWare did agree to offer host support for Solaris. With Virtual Box all they need to do is get community support (and possibly import more components from qemu?) to add functionality onto the program while keeping control over the direction the program goes in.
All they need to do is implement Solaris host support and it would almost be perfect (disregarding speed issues with both solaris and virutal box, of course).
The following is a partial list of open source software that IBM either created outright, or has contributed to. You might be familiar with a couple of them.
Abstract Machine Test Utility for Linux Common Criteria Certificate
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility to check whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware are still being enforced.
AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications contains a collection of open source and GNU software built for AIX 5L for IBM pSeries systems and IBM RS/6000.
Ami - Korean Input Method
Korean IMS (Input Method System) Ami.
Anaconda
Anaconda is the installation program for Red Hat distributions.
Apache
Home of the Apache Web server and several dozen related projects.
Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool.
Apache APR
Apache Portable Runtime
Apache Cocoon
A Web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based Web development.
Apache DB project
Open source database solutions
Apache Directory
The Apache Directory project aims to produce a high-performance and production-quality LDAP server written in Java.
Apache Excalibur
Excalibur's primary product is a lightweight, embeddable Inversion of control container named Fortress that is written in Java code.
Apache Forrest
Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based upon Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images, and other resources.
Apache Geronimo
Apache Geronimo is the J2EE server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open-source, certified J2EE server that: is licensed under the Apache License, passes Sun's TCK for J2EE 1.4, and reuses the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today, with new ASF code to complete the J2EE stack.
Apache Gump
Apache's continuous integration tool
Apache Jakarta
A diverse set of open source Java solutions
Apache James
The Apache Java Enterprise Mail Server (Apache James) is a 100% pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server. James was designed to be a complete and portable enterprise mail engine solution based on currently available open protocols.
Apache Lenya
Apache Lenya is an Open Source Java/XML Content Management System and comes with revision control, site management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow.
Apache Logging Services
Cross-language logging services for purposes of application debugging and auditing.
Apache Maven
Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.
Apache mod_Perl
mod_perl brings together the full power of the Perl programming language and the Apache HTTP server
Apache Portals
Apache Portals is a collaborative software development project dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available portal-related software on a variety of platforms and programming languages.
Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.
Apache Struts
The goal of the Apache Struts project is to encourage application architectures based on the "Model 2" approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. Under Model 2, a servlet (or equivalent) manages business logic execution, and presentation logic resides mainly in server pages.
Apache Tcl
An umbrella for Tcl-Apache integration efforts
Apache Tuscany
Tuscany provides multiple language implementations of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications and related technologies, such as SDO.
cheaply on linux. I sometimes baby sit a friends internet cafe over here (Athens, Greece) and most of my friends customers just use yahoo msgr as a video phone to the phillipines, sri lanka, egypt etc.
Read that as tech illiterate i.e. "how do i switch on this machine?" so changing msgr or OS isn't so easy. Despite the "year of linux on washing machines" fandom I still can't switch them from windows to linux. The program formerly known as GAIM isn't an option...
Heard about the acquisition yesterday and kicked the tires. So, for anyone thinking of playing with VirtualBox - a quick summary. Yes, it's nice - the UI is prettier than MS's offering . Much more flexible options for mounting devices, shared folders etc.
It's simple to use, but seems a lot slower for I/O etc. No guest additions for systems before win2k though (someone scratch that itch on the open source edition plz :-) ).
Emulated video seems to be a plain vanilla VGA but isn't a known card so old systems like win98se end up 16 color 640x480 ). Can use pre-existing VMWare HD's. Emulates AC97 for audio, so perhaps not as useful as DosBox ,VPC 2004,7 for old games :-(
A quick prayer to Sun though - if you're not going to open source completely the full version please at least open it community style (like OpenOffice.ORG).
If you do that, the chances are that the vast Mongolian Hordes (R) of Linux hackers will crawl all over it and turn it into a real killer app.
Andy.
I find it appropriate that the story icon is a red Swingline stapler.
Long signatures suck.