VentureBeat reports that Sun has acquired Innotek, a company developing an open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox. Sun move follows the acquisition of MySQL and other open source companies such as StarOffice.
There are now at least three different offers to run virtual machines: Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox. This acquisition marks the definitive commoditization of computer hardware. Today you can run any of the major OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux) on the two major consumer machine: Mac and PC hardware are in facts completely compatible (through Bootcamp or a virtual machine product) and Intel-compatible Linux servers are replacing older HP and Sparc hardware in the corporate world.
One can't say proprietary architectures have been very successful over the last 10 years. DEC (acquired by Compaq), HP, IBM, SGI, Sun and Apple have all converged towards an Intel-compatible platform. Ironically, this represents the best time for consumers to consider alternatives to Windows-only machines. Microsoft is now put under pressure from both the convergence towards a common platform (thus making the OS less relevant) and the Internet. The old proprietary OS model is fading out, as are other parts of the enterprise infrastructure.
Technorati Tags: open source
There are now at least three different offers to run virtual machines: Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox. This acquisition marks the definitive commoditization of computer hardware. Today you can run any of the major OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux) on the two major consumer machine: Mac and PC hardware are in facts completely compatible (through Bootcamp or a virtual machine product) and Intel-compatible Linux servers are replacing older HP and Sparc hardware in the corporate world.
One can't say proprietary architectures have been very successful over the last 10 years. DEC (acquired by Compaq), HP, IBM, SGI, Sun and Apple have all converged towards an Intel-compatible platform. Ironically, this represents the best time for consumers to consider alternatives to Windows-only machines. Microsoft is now put under pressure from both the convergence towards a common platform (thus making the OS less relevant) and the Internet. The old proprietary OS model is fading out, as are other parts of the enterprise infrastructure.
Technorati Tags: open source
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