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Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop

Free and Open Source VirtualBox Desktop Virtualization Available for All Major Operating Systems
SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) 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 http://www.virtualbox.org and http://www.openxvm.org.

allix wrote:it will be interesting to follow, maybe they will even release the non-free version of virtualbox.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

allix wrote:it will be interesting to follow, maybe they will even release the non-free version of virtualbox.

I was gonna say, that I hope that Sun would release all of VirtualBox under the GPL.

The two things that MySQL and Innotek have in common is that they have already implemented both closed and open source editions of their software. This is a trend that is mirrored in Sun's own strategy of releasing code to the Open Source community well (should read "while") offering service and support for customers who wish to purchase it.