macfidelity

I was just reading the feed from daringfireball while realising that Sun bought innotek.

innotek is a german company and developer of VirtualBox. Seems like the second open-source related takeover (MySQL) by Sun in a short series.

Tim Masland wrote about the background story in his blog.

A teaser:

It’s official. We just announced our intent to acquire innotek - a small company in Germany with (a) some very smart people and (b) some very significant technology, called VirtualBox. What is VirtualBox? Well, if you’re a hypervisor engineer, then it’s best explained as a high performance type 2 hypervisor that uses a combination of virtualization techniques to run many different unmodified operating systems in x86 virtual machines. It’s highly portable across multiple hosts and supports a wide range of guest operating systems.

But perhaps that’s a bit dry. And you don’t need to be a hypervisor engineer to find it extremely useful.

Think of it this way. If you download and install VirtualBox on your laptop - running Windows, MacOS X, Linux or OpenSolaris, you can then run most any other popular Operating System on the same machine. Or several at the same time, depending on what hardware resources are available. The download is around 25Mbytes on most platforms. And what’s truly cool about it for developers is that the download is free for personal use, and the code for VirtualBox is GPLv2 open source. So as well as VirtualBox being a cool product and a powerful set of technologies, it’s also a community, and a great fit with Sun’s broader open source strategies.

We think this tool is incredibly useful for developers - because most developers want to target multiple operating systems to maximise their audience and return on the time they’ve invested in their applications, and tools like VirtualBox let them do that by running everything - test environments, debug environments, etc. - on a single laptop. How does VirtualBox stack up against the other laptop and desktop options? Well I think it’s great, but you don’t have to take my word for it - there’s a couple of great reviews here and here.

While browsing the virtualBox news-pages i noticed that they realized an updates Mac OS X Version some weeks ago. Guess i have to try it….as the last Mac OS X release was not that perfect hehe.

About Mulberry:

Mulberry started off life as a software project that was really meant to help the author learn more about the internet and internet protocols used for email. However, it became much more than that and garnered support from a small (in internet terms) group of users and institutions many of whom relied on the product as their primary email tool.

Whilst it started as only an IMAP client and only on Mac OS, it has grown to cover not only other email protocols, but also calendaring and scheduling and is available on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux systems.

Adherence to standards is a key belief on the part of the developers, and active participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force and the standards process is an important aspect.

Ultimately the failure of the original company (for a whole host of reasons) was really a reflection of the fact that Mulberry had failed to grow a market share that could sustain the company in a market where free clients (of varying quality) are readily available.

Now Mulberry itself is free, though its future is still cloudy in terms of whether development will advance or not…

Quote from the project page:

The full code for Mulberry (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux) is now available as open source under an Apache 2 License. Full details available on the wiki.

The link to the trac-system

So lets wait for the first new releases of that client….

Just a short link-reminder for myself

• Apple OpenSource
• Apple Darwin

Just found the Project: SSS aka Software for Starving Students

According to the project page it is:

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

An example screenshot:

From my point of view….get some software names out of the list, check the details at versiontracker.com and DL the single package…but anyway, the basic SSS idea is nice.

Best regards
fidel