Virtualization Daily

CRMBuyer has published an interesting article about the changing environment for software licensing. One of the things that’s changing in that environment is the growing use of virtualization technology.

And virtualization will become an issue soon, as it moves out of the test and development phase and into production environments. Lechner says 54 percent of IBM’s customers have told it that they plan to start applying virtualization this year.

This creates all kinds of problems for traditional software licensing models and those models also create a lot of problems for people who are using virtualization. Of particular interest to me personally is the question of how you build a virtual appliance that contains commercial software like Microsoft Windows. Right now you can’t due to licensing issues and it’s not clear at this point whether or not Microsoft will ever allow it. And it’s not just Windows, every component of the stack that makes up the application must have a license that allows redistribution. That’s a sticky issue and it’s probably not one that will be overcome in the near future. This means Open Source is currently the only way in virtual appliances. This is an interesting twist too, because historically Open Source has been criticized for being hard to install, but virtual appliances change that equation dramatically. So all Open Source virtual appliances are what we get today. But from a business perspective, we need to be able to distribute commercial software in a similar manner. Todays licensing mechanisms are inadequate for those needs and it makes choosing any kind of commercial stack for software development problematic if the chosen vendor doesn’t have a solid model for redistribution.