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Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

[Posted February 14, 2008 by cook]

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to buy innotek. "Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun's leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org." (Thanks to Cry Regarder).
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Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

Posted Feb 14, 2008 17:55 UTC (Thu) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link] (4 responses) 

This looks like good news to me.
I use VirtualBox it at work and at home to run legacy software (Windows XP), and really like
the performance and seamless integration.
I hope Sun will open the proprietary parts in order to speed up development.
Right now the features I miss the most are USB drive support, print support, clipboard
integration and drag&drop.
Good work, Jonathan.

Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

Posted Feb 14, 2008 18:51 UTC (Thu) by timschmidt (guest, #38269) [Link] (2 responses) 

It _could_ be good news, if they open up the closed bits.  On the other hand, Sun has a
history of managing FOSS projects with a grip just too tight for comfort.  Years of the Java
Community Process, OpenOffice.org's slow uptake of non-Sun patches (necessitating OO.o-build),
OpenSolaris' Linux-incompatible license, just to name a few.  Much like X development in the
Xfree86 days, a poorly managed but 'good enough' project is quite capable of tripping up rapid
development, and ending innovation, while successfully discouraging new competitors and forks.
:(

I'm not sure that no management, allowing someone from the community to step up, is always
better than poor management, but that seems to have been the case with Xfree86 and possibly
GCC (pre-egcs).

The best thing that could happen, obviously, is that Sun could open up all the code, and pour
tons of development effort into the software _and_ the community.  Mostly the community.

But I think second best would be for sun to open the code and walk away.  Seeing the
community's best desktop virtualization tool stagnate while only features Sun cares about get
added would be painful to watch.

Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

Posted Feb 14, 2008 21:16 UTC (Thu) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link] (1 responses) 

In particular, the USB support should be migrated from the closed version to the free version.
This is the big showstopper for using VirtualBox as a vmware killer.  In any case, usbip will
soon make the advantage of keeping this feature closed-source irrelevant.

Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

Posted Feb 15, 2008 1:38 UTC (Fri) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] 

> In any case, usbip will soon make the advantage of keeping this feature closed-source
irrelevant.

It seems they support linux only, at least at the moment.

Sun Microsystems to Acquire innotek

Posted Feb 22, 2008 14:17 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] 

snapshots?!


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