"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!
Member since:2006-04-09
@ ChipX86
Thank you for your reply. Let me ask you, do you work/represent VMware?
You have to excuse me because I'm a bit hostile to patents like the ones that were awarded to VMware.
Like I as saying, in VMware you are able to create a disk which is sort of the reference and always reboot with the same one, so that any changes made to it on the fly are not retained. You’re also able to use a single disk and then branch from it other virtual machines where only the changes to that reference disk are maintained separately.
It is interesting (read strange) that that feature isn’t in Parallels nor in Virtual PC. Microsoft has a cloning notion, but not all this fancy stuff.
Well maybe in the next versions? No, it never comes out. Why? Well, we all remember seeing a long list of patent numbers over the VMware site and the 'About' box.
Doing a little bit of research we can easily find out that VMware is happy to patent a LOT of stuff, most of it is just engineering.
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.
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"...
And the abstract of the patent says: “A computer system is interrupted and its entire state information is extracted as one or more checkpoints at one or more respective points during operation of the system. The checkpoint may be restored into the system at any later time, even multiple times. And it may also even be loaded into one or more other systems. All systems loaded with the same checkpoint will then execute from the same checkpointed state. The state extraction mechanism is preferably a virtual machine monitor on which one or more virtual machines are installed, each virtual machine constituting an encapsulated, virtualized computer system whose states can be checkpointed under control of the virtual machine monitor. Checkpoints may be stored on a portable memory device or transmitted as a batch or dynamically over a network, so that even virtual machines installed at different sites may execute from the same state.”
And that’s a patent!
Sounds like VMware has locked that down. That’s why you’re not seeing it in other programs... and that really bugs me because this is pure mathematics, you can't patent mathematics, its the "natural flow" of nature if you wish, you shouldn't be allowed to patent something as 'trivial' as this.
Now, would you say that if Parallels or Microsoft would come out with something similar, VMware would NOT enforce the patents?
PS: I'm not criticizing VMware, they have done a SUPERB job over the years, I'm criticizing the way patents are awarded and the enforcement of ridiculous patents such as these, which is just a lawyers game, they will always be the winners, not really the users (my wife is a lawyer so I can speak honestly and freely about this).
Edited 2007-06-06 23:21
Member since:2006-09-30
> We don't use patents to withhold technologies from other companies.
Maybe not you, but it is a known fact that the (US specially) patent system has been twisted to that end by software companies. So it's become subject to suspicion on everyone currently.
Software patents are illegal in EU and I really hope it stays this way. Software = speech.
Member since:
2006-04-09
Sorry my ignorance but isn't this basically the same as Parallels' Coherence?
http://www.parallels.com/products/coherence/
I just hope they don't start patenting this stuff otherwise we will end up with problems like when they granted a patent to VMware over something as trivial as system/OS 'snapshots' (!!)...
By the way, its a bit annoying to click the link and to go a blog, click the link in the blog and go to Digg and then clicking the link again to end up in You Tube.
Edited 2007-06-06 21:23