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Sun Snags Open Source Virtualization Company, Innotek

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Feb 13, 2008 06:42 PM
from the sun-renamed-to-hoover dept.
Sun Microsystems IT
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.'"

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  • Between what they've opened of their own - and the companies they've bought is anyone bigger in the open source realm?

    • Re:Sun - Open Source Powerhouse (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zappepcs (820751) on Wednesday February 13, @07:10PM (#22412922) Journal
      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.

      • Re:Sun - Open Source Powerhouse (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sanat (702) on Wednesday February 13, @07:37PM (#22413252)
        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.

      • losing ground like a sieve
        Don't worry about it; that's just water over the bridge.

      • Yes, I wish the Solaris 10 SAMP stack was easier to work with, but it does work, and is getting better.
        Veering off topic here, but as someone who makes a living setting up and maintaining Solaris and RHEL systems (among others) I'm interested to hear what you consider to be hard or inferior about AMP on Solaris 10 compared to RHEL.
        • g1zmo,
          I'm more than happy to accommodate in the hopes someone has a really fine website to show me where I'm wrong. I'm just really getting started on a process of upgrading a truckload of Sun E-250s and E-450s from Solaris 5.8. I'm starting out by building Solaris 10 on several boxes in hopes of creating a repeatable and stable SAMP build for the Ultrasparc architecture. Most of the code I handle at work is shell scripts and PERL. We use some Oracle but are switching to MySQL at the same time here. Yeah, I
    • IBM, Redhat and I hate to admit Novel, still do a lot more (as far as I can tell) that Sun when it comes to open source software.
      • 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).

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by d3vi1 (710592)
        Nope.
        I know that both IBM and Novell have contributed to the open source community, but their contributions are small (in number of lines of code) compared to OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Java and many others. Sun also contributed to a lot of projects (see the GNOME project), but in lines of code it's the products that they open-sourced that make the big difference.
        • I'd suggest that Suse isn't small...
          • I'd suggest you're wrong. SUSE bundles work done by other people in the OSS community. They do add some nice features, bug fixes, and tools, but they produce nowhere near the weight of OSS code that Sun does. I'll put the LOC count of OpenSolaris code that Sun donated against the donations of SUSE any day. The ratio would be grossly unfair, and that's without counting Sun's many other contributions!

  • Great news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by unityofsaints (1213900) <unityofsaints @ w e b .de> on Wednesday February 13, @06:51PM (#22412646) Homepage
    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!
    • 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

  • is it April 1st yet? (Score:3, Funny)

    by blitzkrieg3 (995849) on Wednesday February 13, @06:58PM (#22412750)
    Innotek... don't you mean Initech [techcomedy.com]?

  • I hope... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rix (54095) on Wednesday February 13, @07:16PM (#22413000)
    They buy fire insurance before they start moving desks and taking people's staplers.
  • Wake me up when they acquire Innotrode.

  • Links (Score:4, Informative)

    by condition-label-red (657497) on Wednesday February 13, @08:14PM (#22413690) Homepage
    It would have been nice to have a link to Innotek [innotek.de] and their product: VirtualBox [virtualbox.org]. Which I am pretty sure is not associated with the dog training products [innotek.net] that Google ranks at the top of its search [google.com].
  • 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 imp

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