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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.'"
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!
You might have understated that. MySQL, Innotek, OpenSparc, OpenSolaris and other efforts, they may soon play a dominating role in the computing world that MS can only look at with envy.
Even if it is mostly open or F/OSS, it still leaves MS with nothing to offer. Business, small and large will look at F/OSS software that is not only backed by a large OS maker, but also a large hardware maker with just as much desire as they do to MS now. Sun has been stacking the deck in their favor for quite some time and it's starting to look like a royal flush in there.
Sure, you can quibble over the value of various items in Sun's stable, but it's nearly a complete stable. Not much of it, if any, is anywhere near as repulsive as Vista.
Sun has opened their hardware (ish), opened the OS to enable use on different (reasonably priced) hardware, and are now picking up the applications that most businesses want to use, can use, or are already using.
If IBM scared MS, they should now be afraid of Sun too.
My point: MS is not the only 'we do it all' software house in the game. Sun is going from losing ground like a sieve to becoming a player that will upset MS's applecart.
Yes, I wish the Solaris 10 SAMP stack was easier to work with, but it does work, and is getting better. It will be an alternative to RedHat and roll-your-own F/OSS, and will be another place to get support for your entire data center buildout. That means IBM **AND** Sun will both be in a position to outsell MS in the data center. Soon after that... well, lets just say I look forward to the MS good-bye party.
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They buy fire insurance before they start moving desks and taking people's staplers.
I feel that Microsoft will always have a market, however I also sense that the open source movements including Sun will put a major roadblock in their present path of being the 800 lb monkey.
These changes seem to be right in front of us in the now moment and we have a ringside seat to watch it all go down. The next few years are really going to be interesting and will be something that we can tell our children or our children's children about in the future years... how open source came of age and the mighty Goliath(s) fell.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
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.
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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).
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.