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.'"

Comments

Links

[condition-label-red]

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.

Re:Sun - Open Source Powerhouse

[d3vi1]

Try looking a little harder. Sun contributed a lot more to open source than IBM or Novel or Red Hat. Most of it's contributions come from formerly proprietary software that was open sourced (OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, etc.), but they also contribute a lot to projects such as Xorg, GNOME, Linux, Postgres, Samba, Xen, etc. Furthermore, there are projects started by Sun that from version 1 are open source (see OpenSPARC).
Only the projects that I mentioned above contain more source code than Novel and IBM and RedHat ever contributed, and keep in mind that Sun contributes to a lot more projects.
I really think that they are on the right track, even though they have occasional troubles (see the OOo contribution problem with the Novel folks, or the OpenDS issue).