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.'"

Re:Sun - Open Source Powerhouse

[d3vi1]

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.

Links

[condition-label-red]

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].

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).

Re:Nice move, SUN -now port it to Solaris.

[Anonymous Coward]

All they need to do is implement Solaris host support and it would almost be perfect (disregarding speed issues with both solaris and virutal box, of course).

Uhh.. it's already beta dude. Go to the Virtualbox web site and check the downloads.

I keep preying they'll port it to one or more of the BSDs one day.

IBM's contributions to open source

[Anonymous Coward]

The following is a partial list of open source software that IBM either created outright, or has contributed to. You might be familiar with a couple of them.

Abstract Machine Test Utility for Linux Common Criteria Certificate
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility to check whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware are still being enforced.

AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications contains a collection of open source and GNU software built for AIX 5L for IBM pSeries systems and IBM RS/6000.

Ami - Korean Input Method
Korean IMS (Input Method System) Ami.

Anaconda
Anaconda is the installation program for Red Hat distributions.

Apache
Home of the Apache Web server and several dozen related projects.

Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool.

Apache APR
Apache Portable Runtime

Apache Cocoon
A Web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based Web development.

Apache DB project
Open source database solutions

Apache Directory
The Apache Directory project aims to produce a high-performance and production-quality LDAP server written in Java.

Apache Excalibur
Excalibur's primary product is a lightweight, embeddable Inversion of control container named Fortress that is written in Java code.

Apache Forrest
Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based upon Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images, and other resources.

Apache Geronimo
Apache Geronimo is the J2EE server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open-source, certified J2EE server that: is licensed under the Apache License, passes Sun's TCK for J2EE 1.4, and reuses the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today, with new ASF code to complete the J2EE stack.

Apache Gump
Apache's continuous integration tool

Apache Jakarta
A diverse set of open source Java solutions

Apache James
The Apache Java Enterprise Mail Server (Apache James) is a 100% pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server. James was designed to be a complete and portable enterprise mail engine solution based on currently available open protocols.

Apache Lenya
Apache Lenya is an Open Source Java/XML Content Management System and comes with revision control, site management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow.

Apache Logging Services
Cross-language logging services for purposes of application debugging and auditing.

Apache Maven
Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

Apache mod_Perl
mod_perl brings together the full power of the Perl programming language and the Apache HTTP server

Apache Portals
Apache Portals is a collaborative software development project dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available portal-related software on a variety of platforms and programming languages.

Apache SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.

Apache Struts
The goal of the Apache Struts project is to encourage application architectures based on the "Model 2" approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. Under Model 2, a servlet (or equivalent) manages business logic execution, and presentation logic resides mainly in server pages.

Apache Tcl
An umbrella for Tcl-Apache integration efforts

Apache Tuscany
Tuscany provides multiple language implementations of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications and related technologies, such as SDO.