Virtualization Daily

Ilya Baimetov over on the Virtuozzo blog is writing about how VMWare is looking to start a new OS war. This is something I definitely agree with, there is a new OS war brewing, but Ilya doesn’t seen to quite understand what’s really going on. He says:

This new OS war will have negative effect on almost everyone. ISVs will have to learn a new platform and change the way they develop applications.

This completely misses the point of what the new OS war is about. It’s not over APIs used by developers to build applications, it’s simply over what sits at the lowest level of the stack and controls the hardware. This is actually a liberating event as far as application developers are concerned. They are now able to choose their OS, APIs and toolset regardless of how complex it may be and simply bundle it all together into a virtual machine that can be easily deployed on Windows, Linux or even Mac OS X without any changes. That’s a huge benefit for developers and that’s what is meant when people say the OS doesn’t matter anymore. There’s still an OS there, it sits under the application, but to the user of the application it really doesn’t matter what that OS is. Also, what runs on the real hardware is now completely independent from what is required to run the application. For now, that means the applications will still include a true OS like Windows or Linux, but in many cases that’s just a lot of bloat that is unnecessary. As the OS that applications are based on slims down, it becomes even less relevant.

So, on one hand the OS that the application is built for doesn’t matter, but on the other the new “OS war” is over the virtualization layer that applications (including their OS) are deployed to. It’s a bit of a shift in thinking, but once made, it’s truly an event of liberation for application developers.