After my last post on VMWare, I have looked through the VMWare Applicance Directory and I personally found so many good “appliances”, a.k.a. virtual machines. The beatiful thing is that most of them are preconfigured and ready to use with a VMWare player/ server/ workstation installation.
OpenSource software are sometimes famous for the lack or documentations and difficult installation process. With the appliance program from VMWare, suddenly there is a much better way to educate the users about a particular project by simply providing a simple, prebuilt virtual machine with everything they need to start the application. VMWare has suddenly transformed how OpenSource software is presented. Never before OpenSource projects can strongly advocate for their brainchilds by releasing a torrent file of the virtual machine image. Talking about almost zero bandwidth cost and wide distribution! Plus developers can compete for the best appliance and win the generous $200,000 prize from VMWare . What more can the community benefit from this?
I have found so many good packages such as SugarCRM, Subversion/Trac integrations (Buildix) for agile software development, or even a free DOS with popular games that is less than 15 Mb. Now testing out the new release of Fedora Core or Ubuntu is trivial with the images. Or I can even learn how to operate a cluster with the OSCAR appliance package, how awesome is that? Or I can setup a OpenLDAP server to test out the software in 5 minutes - learning networking and network administration cannot be any easier! Or there is one Multi-Browser appliance to test for browser compability
I cannot wait to see if someone would release a copy of Windows XP on an image via the torrent networks, that would be highly illegal but a great way to test out new software. Ah, I suddenly remember about my WindowsXP image file for Microsoft VirtualPC buried somewhere in my hard drives. Thanks to the utility that comes with the VMWare installation, I can convert the old image file into a fully working Windows XP for VMWare. But lets just hope that I won’t get any spyware onto it 
VMWare, thank you! You deserve a great place on the OpenSource’s Hall of Fame list.
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