Four Horsemen of the Apostrophe

Looking back at the end of 2003 and the first few months of 2004 following the release of Cooperative Linux, a lot of things have changed.

Cooperative Linux was created as a hack to overcome the expenses of Linux virtualization under Windows. It generated a lot of attention simply because it managed to introduce a lot of Linux newbies to the OSS community. Back then, there were a few commercial products that provided Linux virtualization, and some free but sub-optimal VMs (bochs, qemu).

Back then, I was contacted by numerous folks saying that they are happy that they don't have to buy VMware and instead they can use coLinux. So, it was seems to me that coLinux was taking some small (or insignificant?) market share from VMware.

Since 2004 two important things happened:

• VMware have made a few changes to their marketing strategy and decide to release some of their products for free. There are several pages on the Internet that tells you how to "exploit" VMware's free vmplayer to your advantage, despite all of the 'missing features'.
  
• Hardware-assisted virtualization have made itself main-stream which made it quite easier for applications to run an emulated Windows under Linux and vise-versa.

With these two big changes, the cheap and "dirty" Cooperative Linux is much less needed nowadays. BTW, "dirty" is actually the word Linus Torvalds used to describe Cooperative Linux to my ears back in OLS 2004 (not that I feel insulted in any way, actually I agree with him).  Every CS major can (hopefully) tell you that cooperative virtualization is not the academically 'nice' approach to virtualization, therefore coLinux is simple just a hack, and I completely agree with that. It was correct 3 years ago, and it is especially correct now, considering that hardware virtualization is available.

Back when coLinux started, VMware was acquired by EMC, so assuming that VMware A.K.A. EMC lost some sort of market share as a result, it wouldn't be the first time that I have aided in a market share loss of EMC.

Ever since September 2005 I have been employed at XIV as a Linux specialist. XIV develops a high-end storage systems that compete both in performance and price against EMC's products. XIV is already selling, and it has a great potential to take market share out of EMC.

If you want to read about XIV, you can check this news article (Hebrew), forwarded from The Marker finance Israel magazine, stored on Walla, one of the biggest Israeli news site, which also happens to be a customer of XIV.