i’ve known about a product named virtualbox for quite awhile now..i never really looked into it any further than just installing it on my laptop. virtualbox is a GPL’d piece of software that pretty much attempts to clone vmware workstation. anyways, it’s put out by a company called innotek, that i just now found out was acquired by sun not too long ago.

so i should be all embracing this technology with open arms because i adore vms. it’s just that vmware is such a solid product, the interface is great and so on, it’s practically a industry standard…etc.. i could go on making excuses forever. i just love vmware products. and server & player are free and work cross-platform. so i don’t have a solid reason to jump ship on my beloved vmware products quite yet. and this is really odd behavior from me because i’ve become a sort of open source purist. i try to use OSS whenever humanly possible. arghh my hypocritical nature.

the roadmap for virtualbox alludes that a future version will be able to import vmware harddisks. that’s definitely awesome. i also toyed around with virtualpc for a few months out of curiosity on windows. it’s not really even in the same league as vmware.

this makes me ponder…lets say microsoft gave away ms office (whatever version) for free and it was cross platform. would i be using that instead of openoffice? being that the source is microsoft, i think it’s safe to say no. why? because it would reek of gimmickyness and i would think it was some sort of trial eval whatnot that would be revoked in a few months. something of that sort. there’s a sort of reassuring feeling with OSS, that once a piece of software is released out there it’s forever free. licenses can be changed, but forks can be made and the community will make products survive. and besides that i feel a sort of loyalty to products i use…i ran across staroffice in the late 90’s. i only dabbled with it then but was impressed. when openoffice was first released i was all about it and immediately started using it at work and at home. i actually did all of my class work for 3 years or so solely w/ openoffice.

final note, ran across an article that speculated that with the wide spread adoption of virtualization in the data center, server hardware sales will drop. well…most likely, but maybe it will be offset by the purchases of a few big iron systems to run the vm infrastructure.