Following Sun’s recent purchase of another open-source company, MySQL, Sun has just bought Innotek, according to Information Week. Innotek is the supporting company behind the VirtualBox virtualization software, which is distributed in both open-source and proprietary versions. VirtualBox emerged as a frequently used virtualization product quite recently, but it already has features that compete with larger proprietary-only companies.

Although it is impossible to know for sure, this acquisition seems likely to be a good thing for the development of VirtualBox. Sun has previously shown their awareness of open-source software with their support of Open Office and there is no reason to believe they will do anything other than put more resources into the development of both versions of VirtualBox. Although it seems unlikely that there will be any very noticeable changes to VirtualBox in the near future, in the long term this acquisition should be good for VirtualBox.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Bussiness, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.