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:
2007-06-07
Disclaimer: I do work for VMware.
> It is interesting (read strange) that that feature isn’t in Parallels
My understanding is that Parallels Desktop 3.0 (private beta) has multiple snapshots. I guess we can now conclude that this whole snapshot patent issue was just FUD. The only question is: whose intesrest is it to spread this FUD?
> Look at this, filed back in October of ’98 is a Patent 6397242, which
> is titled “Virtualization System Including a Virtual Machine Monitor
> for a Computer with a Segmented Architecture.” Which sort of
> sounds like a generic description of virtual machine technology.
The patent is very specific about using segmentation. It targets x86 processors, of course, for which virtualization did not exist before VMware invented it.
> And as you get down, you get to Patent 6795966, filed on February
> 4th of 2000, and that was issued on September 21st of 2004. Get
> this: “Mechanism for Restoring, Porting, Replicating, and
> Checkpointing"...
Snapshots are just about disk state. This patent is about the entire virtual machine state.
I agree with you the patent system is borken, but it is not VMware's job to fix it. VMware just does what it is best to defend its interests. Who would not?