VMware Player – innovation in action

It’s a simple idea,  but I suspect that the VMware player is going to create disruptive ripples throughout the desktop computing industry,  we thought we liked Linux Live Distro’s well imagine being able to download a myriad different pre-build VMware environments and run them on your normal PC, (memory allowing of course).  Here is a snip from VMware:

VMware Player can be used by anyone to run virtual machines on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player makes it quick and easy to take advantage of the security, flexibility, and portability of virtual machines.

I use VMware a lot and it’s certainly going to make my life easier to distribute VM’s to other people. I can use my www.streamload.com account for the purpose,  which allows me unlimited uploads (I have a 100GB download account) and I can email out links to VM’s for people to download.

Even better for me,  I expect to start receiving a stream of VM’s from suppliers and colleagues with pre-build VM’s for evaluation, and VMware have kick started that process through relationships with; Novell, Redhat, Bea, MySQL, Oracle, and spike. 

In addition the concept of appliances will become viable,  with single purpose pre-built environments being distributed.  VMware themselves have an example – a browser appliance.

Licensing implications are likely to prove interesting,  but for Open Source SW I expect it will prove massively popular as a way for people to increase their confidence.