Cool. Is it only a matter of time before someone implements hardware virtualization in pure Javascript? Perhaps FireFox 10 will open machine instances as a supported MIME type.
I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#82I wouldn't be so positive about open-source everywhere. I'd recommend keeping some amount of the server-side closed source. The risk I see is that competitors can simply use your code and run the cheapest hardware they can find, while you have to run the cheapest hardware you can find and maintain and improve the software. Unless you have a different edge on the hardware side, you have no sustainable competitive adva…
It's fine; the source code to their product is not a competitive advantage ( http://blog.asmartbear.com/unfair-advantages.html )
Copying something done well isn't as easy as it looks, cf. Google, iPhone, MS Office, etc.
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#83When I read your headline, I was excited to think that someone was building a VM service that was tailored to hosting webapps. I wish there was a service with a UI & API for configuring sites and starting up VMs to serve different areas of the site. For example, I could set up mysite.com on this service and then have requests for mysite.com/blog proxied to a VM running WordPress on PHP/MySQL. Requests for mysite.com/…
Thanks for the wishes.
Now to address your suggestions:
1. That is awesome, I have added it to our wiki. This is easily doable and we'll probably implement it.
2. We haven't yet looked into implementing cut&paste. Should be doable.
3. James will join me in the next videos.
4. We're definitely building a test environment. We couldn't do it earlier because we didn't have a good remote method call execution framework, but now James wrote dnode [1] and we can get to implementing it!
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#84What are you using for the underlying virtualization?
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't a lot of Open Source companies make you sign copyright over? Or is that not the case. How did MySql handle this since they were dual licensed?
You only have to sign it over if you want it in the official distribution, which I suppose most normal contributors do. But if someone (competitor or not) forks and adds SuperAwesomeFeature (without signing the copyright over), pkrumins can't pull that into his and license it commercially. It'd have to only exist in his AGPLv3 version, which sounds like hell.
Sounds like a problem with any OS license, not just AGPL...
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#86What are you using for the underlying virtualization?
Currently VMWare and qemu. Virtualbox should also also work. Anything that runs VNC actually.
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#87I was skeptical from the title. My first thought was "isn't this what EC2, and every other VPS provider does?" I have to admit, your pitch won me over - this looks interesting. On second thought, you did say "web", not "internet". I'm so used to people treating the two as synonymous that I didn't make the distinction myself. So I'd say make that more clear.
Well, for most of the people "web" and "internet" are the same things.
I think there was a Google experiment where they asked what is the internet, and people would just say internet explorer, meaning web is their internet.
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#88". You can easily rent 10 virtual machines with Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems and test your software." Linux I can see. Windows and especially OSX though, won't that create licensing issues and a special deal with MS / Apple to provide those VMs?
We still have to figure out the licensing. We're currently more busy with hacking our software than thinking about licensing. So I don't have an answer for your questions.
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#89I think the most interesting aspect of this is that you have implemented a VNC client in JavaScript and HTML. That realy is your core technology and probably has the most value. I could see that being realy useful for implementing things like 3d CAD in the browser, the interface and controls could be plain HTML/CSS and use your vnc technology to show the 3d graphics being drawn on the server. Could you offer some ins…
I'll soon start doing in-depth blogposts with examples on how stackvm works.
But a quick summary is that we have node-rfb collect VNC updates, push them to node-png or node-jpeg which merges the updates and creates an image that then gets pushed via dnode to browser, which then draws it at the right location (absolute positioning of images).
Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
#90First, I have to say that this looks ambitious. There are some pretty exciting things in the gameplan; I am especially interested in the vmcasts idea. While I have to wonder if they can accomplish all of the ideas they lay out here, given the posts I've seen from catonmat.net before, I think they can do it. From what I can tell, Peteris is not just clever, but very motivated and loves to code and introspect his talen…
We don't have any business experience but we hope to gather enough attention that by the time we launch everyone wants a copy of our software already. :)