Sun Acquires Virtualbox Vendor Innotek
Sun Microsystems has been on another spending spree: Sun’s latest acquisition is said to be Innotek, the manufacturer of the Virtualbox Open Source virtualization solution.
According to a recent press announcement, Sun Microsystems has submitted a takeover bid to Innotek shareholders; the price was not disclosed. The young, German enterprise impressed its purchaser with figures of more than four million downloads since it released its code in January 2007. Virtualbox is to become part of Sun’s virtualization strategy, which the enterprise announced in November 2007 under the Sun xVM caption. "VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product" said Rich Green, Vice President Sun Software, and added: "and will align perfectly with Sun's other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL." He sees Sun’s xVM server at the core of the data center and Virtualbox as the perfect match for any laptop or desktop. Sun xVM is based on the free Xen virtualization technology which Sun customizes and optimizes for its own applications.
Details of the acquisition and the price have not been disclosed, however, the press release does reveal that the transaction will not impact Sun’s profit per share. The deal is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of the 2008 fiscal year, which would be late March.
After MySQL, Innotek is the second Open Source company on Sun’s shopping list in recent weeks. January 16 Sun announced the acquisition of the company behind the MySQL Open Source database at a price of one billion dollars.
Virtualbox weighs in at less than 20MB and can be downloaded from the project website. The guest operating system supported by Virtualbox include Windows 3.1 through Vista, Linux Kernel 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6, Solaris x86, OS/2, Netware and DOS.
Issue 172/2015
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Cisco Releases Annual Security Report
Spammers go low-volume, and 90% of IE browsers are unpatched.
-
Zero Day Exploits Target Flash
Adobe scrambles to release patches for vulnerable Flash Player.
-
Intel Unveils Compute Stick
Four-inch-long computer on a stick lets you boot a full Linux system from any HDMI display device.
-
Obama Proposes Personal Data Notification Law
New statute would require companies to report break-ins to consumers.
-
TGXf Project Warns of File Transfer through Screen Pixels
Weird data transfer technique avoids all standard security measures.
-
Industry Giants Announce a Fix for the Password Mess
FIDO alliance declares the beginning of the end for old-style login authentication.
-
Poll: Vote for the Best Open Source Software for Photographers
The Linux New Media Awards have honored the most significant products, projects, people, and organizations for open source/Linux every year since 2000.
-
Debian Gets Forked
Legendary Uber-distro splits over the systemd controversy.
-
Linux Mint Project Releases Mint 17.1
New LTS version offers many refinements for the Cinnamon and Mate desktops and significant improvement under the hood.
-
CeBIT Open Source Forum Call for Papers
One of CeBIT’s most successful forums returns in 2015.