The statement from Sun:

SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.

First MySQL, now Virtualbox. Sun is going open-source mad!

Let’s just hope this doesn’t mean that they’re going to going to spin out a”professional” non-free version to compete with VMWare Workstation (keeping the FOSS version crippled).

Have a look at this great little comparison between the biggest four names in virtualization.

This article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation.

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This article looked at four different products for virtualization in Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux. The findings were interesting - the only product that requires the purchase of a licence for personal use, Parallels, actually performed the worst of the group. Qemu did well for a completely free-as-in-speech application, although VMware and VirtualBox blew the competition away in terms of performance.