Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Jun 2007 20:42 UTC
"I remember the day I was interviewed at VMware. I was asked what I would do to improve Workstation, and one of the things I said was that it would be nice to make a VM go rootless. That is, pull application windows out of the VM and make them integrate well with the operating system. I wasn't the only one. A lot of people wanted this type of feature. It's been discussed for years, but it's always been hard to find the manpower to do it. But competition is good, and we finally got some people on this feature. And it turned out spectacularly."
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Member since:
2005-10-27
I think there's some confusion
To my knowledge, we have never used a patent to go after any company, only in a defensive manner when we were sued over patents first. We don't use patents to withhold technologies from other companies. I have heard this rumor about patents and snapshots before, but nobody has shown me a link yet to prove this.
This feature is similar to Coherence, but improved (at least over their 2.x version.. I don't personally know how 3.0 works yet). In Coherence, all the windows are on one layer. Imagine just removing the VM window chrome and making the background transparent. This prevents such things as proper window stacking and Expose from working correctly.
We've gone a step further and implemented this such that the windows themselves are pulled out into the host. This allows Expose to work, fixes window stackings, etc. It also gives us more opportunities for future improvements and integration.
Hope this answers any questions and clears up any confusion!