Virtualization in spotlight at LinuxWorld

“Endless Love” may never sound the same after Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig entertained the crowd at this year’s LinuxWorld 2006 in San Francisco with a mashup of the song in which President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were substituted in for Lionel Richie and Diana Ross.

The idea was to show how a read-only copy-protected version of the video can be transformed by “read-write” creative freedom into a video of two world leaders professing endless love for their alliance.

Lessig, an advocate of copyright law changes to allow artists to create new art in the digital world by sampling previous works, appealed to the freedom-loving Linux audience to support his effort: “Only you can teach those outside of your world about the potential for this world,” he said.

But Lionel Richie wasn’t the only one enjoying the spotlight.  Evidence of virtualization’s ascendancy was everywhere, after years spent in the shadow of the tech world. Dell shared its exhibit space at San Francisco’s Moscone Center with its virtualization partners, including virtualization software maker VMware.

Hewlett-Packard said it is partnering with VMware, XenSource, and others to deliver virtualization. But,  as Christine Martino, vice president of open source and Linux organization at HP said, “It is still being defined.”

IBM has offered virtualization on mainframe computers going back 40 years, said Kevin Leahy, marketing vice president for virtualization at IBM. But that hasn’t stopped virtualization from being the big new thing on client/server networks.

“What people are saying is that we want to apply these virtualization technologies to this distributed world,” Leahy said.

Still, it remains to be seen which virtualization solutions will survive, Martino said. In other words, “Endless Possibilities.”