With apologies to my boss, a story in today's Wall Street Journal has me thinking that the future of Linux deployment might perhaps be even better than he predicted.
The realization didn't come quickly. My first glance at the paper is about 10 minutes after rolling out of bed and starting the process of getting my kids to school. I'd like to be able to tell you that as soon as I saw the article, I made the instant leap to my conclusion, but in reality, at 0-dark-hundred my thought process is something like this: "mrmmsmrm... coffee... mehhphrm drmhfsp... coffee..."
Apparently something must have clicked, because I had the presence of mind to place the article in my office for later (coherent) consumption. The topic was netbooks, and how hardware vendors are scrambling to get some new offerings out the factory doors after the very popular Asus Eee PC came out in 2007 and made a big splash in an otherwise bleak electronics market.
It's not just updating product lineups with brand-new netbook solution. An alternative is to get existing laptops to behave more like netbooks. If done right, this is a win-win for hardware OEMs, since with just a little modification, they can roll right into the netbook market. One such approach: adding software to the boot workflow that will "instantly" bring up bare-minimum functionality for laptops, such as browsing, e-mail, and word processing tools.
The article in today's Journal highlighted HyperSpace as one such solution, the release of which is being announced this week the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
HyperSpace is not new; many in the industry have known that Phoenix Technologies was planning to come out with this product sometime in January. The timing with CES seems inevitable. Jim Zemlin mentioned it in the aforementioned blog entry back in October.
Basically, HyperSpace is a hypervisor environment that users can boot directly into on startup. In just a few seconds, the marketing claims, you have a capable Internet device ready to go:
"The HyperSpace platform is enabled by an efficient hypervisor from Phoenix called HyperCore, which is embedded within the core system firmware, or BIOS. HyperCore is a lightweight Zoned Virtual Machine Monitor... that runs specialized core services side by side with Windows."
If this sounds a lot like the SplashTop environment, you're right. Both virtualized environments sit on notebooks and netbooks and deliver faster boot times and more security. And, yes, both are Linux based.
But there is one big difference right now between the two offerings: SplashTop is only offered through OEM bundles, since it is directly installed in the system BIOS. HyperSpace can also be downloaded and installed on existing Vista and XP machines.
This is a huge piece of news. Because not only are we looking at a future where new laptops and netbooks will have some layer of Linux running on them, but now users can install such a layer on their current devices and gain the advantages of such a hypervisor right now.
To say Microsoft is not happy would be a fair guess. In March ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley revealed that Microsoft's relaxation of their restrictive EULA policies for running virtual instances of Vista was actually due to legal action from Phoenix Technologies:
"But the real reason for Microsoft’s capitulation became clear on March 7 via a new joint-status report in the Microsoft-Department of Justice case. It turns out BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies (a long-time Microsoft partner) filed a complaint with antitrust regulators about Microsoft’s virtualization restrictions."
It should be noted that it is not very easy to actually call HyperSpace Linux based. I actually had a Twitter conversation with noted pundit Glyn Moody this morning, as he and I were trying to figure out what the heck HyperSpace was based on. He initially did not think so, especially after reading HyperSpace's really daunting EULA. And while there has been a lot of press coverage over the last few months indicating that HyperSpace was based on Linux, I could not find any mention on the HyperSpace or Phoenix Technologies web sites about Linux to confirm.
Ultimately, leave it to tech/hardware guru Michael Larabel to figure it out. He's posted a really detailed review of HyperSpace over on Phoronix, which I encourage you to read. It validates a lot of Phoenix's marketing claims and clarifies others, such as the fact that at least some of HyperSpace seems to sit on a system's hard drive, and is not just embedded in the BIOS. The review also reveals several confirmations that HyperSpace is indeed Linux based.
Page 5 of that EULA has the final confirmation: the presentation of the GPL and LGPL licenses. (Although this begs the question of where and when will Phoenix be releasing the HyperSpace's free components' source code.)
I don't have an XP or Vista machine to try this out on, so I couldn't tell you if installing this is a good idea. Faster boot times aside, having an extra later of Linux security running on any machine sounds great to me.
Bigger picture, the abilty to enhance existing Windows desktops with a fast, secure environment is a big step towards overall Linux deployment. And, if users grow to like this new "operating system," they (and the hardware vendors) might soon start wondering just exactly why they're paying Microsoft for all that Windows "overhead."
