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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
It looks like a viable candidate for a VM, but still a bit behind the leaders. VMWare and Parallels seem to be better choices if you can afford them, but hopefully being free as in beer and GPL will allow it to catch up rapidly and make the ongoing competition even better. If they can get 3D graphics card support running, I will be looking really hard at VirtualBox.
You're already using Windows -- what's so odd about buying a license?
What would be so odd about that? With a real XP install a cold boot has to go through A) The BIOS (about 3-4 seconds) B) The bootloader (depends) and C) The actual boot up. With a VM you only have to do C. And that isn't including any tweaks that the VM authors have done to speed up XP.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
See, this is one part where a package management tool comes in handy. For example, the binaries that are provided by Sun are not free, BUT when Debian takes the GPL'd source, and makes a .deb file, it is free.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
That bussiness model seems pretty fair to me. Release the code GPL, free binaries for non commerical use, and sell the binaries for corporate clients. They are essentially charging companies for the time and expertise it takes to compile it. And presumably it means they only have to offer support to paying corprorate customers.
A nice thing about that model is that it caps the price at the value added. Think sun is charging too much? compile it yourself and support it yourself. The value contained in the code itself, and value added to the code by unpaid GPL contributors, is not part of the price this way.
And that's a very nice way to make money off GPL. You're not cheating the contributors at all. And anyone can go into competition with sun for the compiling. So it comes down to charging for the value added by sun in compiling and servicing it.
Not quite the same as RedHat's model but highly simmilar
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up... What does everybody have against Sun?
Personally, I appreciate Sun's OSS work. I do understand some of the sentiment though. Sun often seems to be a day late and a dollar short in their OSS ventures. They waited to release OpenSolaris under a reasonable OSS license until Linux had completely dominated that niche. Ditto with many other technologies. Even now, it is a real pain in the butt to actually get a copy of OpenSolaris and install it as a normal user. They make you install a proprietary download manager and give them a bunch of personal info. On almost all of their projects, developers not working at Sun complain about how hard it is to get changes and contributions added to those projects, because of all the red tape. Sun's OSS motto might be "we'll do OSS if we have no other option, and then we'll make it annoying". In this case they've made the binaries for this project unavailable for corporate users in a clear attempt to try to make things artificially hard so they can make money on unnecessary service contracts, instead of making it easy and concentrating on service contracts where they can provide real value (the former strategy often resulting in lesser adoption of their projects, to the detriment of said project).
I'd like to stress that I do appreciate their work. Unlike another person replying, I have no problem with their creating and profiting from both proprietary and OSS projects. They just are a big business that despite being a large OSS contributor, does not play very well with individuals or the OSS community as a whole. It leaves a lot of us personally frustrated with them when we expect them to behave like other big OSS contributors. Heck, even Apple is easier to collaborate with.
It's not odd if you look at it from a contribution standpoint.
The FOSS community contributes to VirtualBox directly through help with development, testing and bug fixing on the project, as well as indirectly through their efforts on all the other FOSS projects upon which VirtualBox depends, including toolchains and mountains of utilities. Availability of source code is clearly not optional for this.
Windows binary users get a bit of a free ride on the back of all that hard work, so instead they contribute to VirtualBox by providing a bit of cash. They don't need access to the source code nor a build environment for this, and what's more, in the Windows environment it's very normal and expected to pay for your packages.
So, the VirtualBox product offering seems quite well adjusted to its two communities, and quite fair as well.
VMWare's real-world SMP and Multi-CPU support is actually pretty shoddy. Although it is "supported" and two virtual processors will show up on the guest, the performance is not anywhere near bare metal multi-cpu performance.
I have a client running MSSQL and Exchange as virtual servers (both multithreaded apps that make good use of multiple processors/cores) and the performance was actually better with single virtual proc than assigning multiple cores to each VM.
VMWare supports processor "pinning" however and allows you to dedicate a specific proc/core to a VM which can really boost performance.
And this shows that Sun is willing to invest in a GPL'd product.