VOS Patents on Virtualizing OSs? 170
Erik Poupaert writes "I've been following VMWare and plex86 (used to be freemware) for a while now, because I think that virtualization may be a solution to quite a number of problems. It basically allows you to run several operating systems concurrently. IBM uses this approach too, to run a large number of Linux instances on their mainframes. While you can leave the task of managing devices and device drivers to the host operating system, guest operating systems can supply you with the ideosyncracies of their particular versions to run the applications that expect them.
Since VMWare is not free, as in free speech, I thought that plex86 would become the lead open-source project in the field.
Now there seems to be a new player, that I never heard of before, called VOS, who claims the whole field to themselves, and have filed patents to obtain a monopoly on the entire discpline. Have they got any chance in succeeding? Or do you think that the patent office would not grant such patent?"
selling banner ads? (Score:1)
Is this a joke? (Score:3)
- There is *no* trial download available, despite the "press release" saying that the product was released a *year* ago. I'd think
/. would find it before that.
- If you look at the site structure, everything is flat-file, i.e. it's all page_XX.htm. Highly unprofessional site.
- The "buy now" page is insecure, so I wouldn't try it.
- They say that USA Today, etc. have commented on Flash VOS; I just tried a google search and nothing showed up on the first page.
If I'm wrong, someone please post a clarification. The only thing is that the domain seems legit: a whois lookup shows that it was registered in 1998...--bdj
Re:Hoax Research (Score:1)
Re:Please, America (Score:2)
In no way does this article say any such thing.
How does a competitive advantage translate into stifling innovation? Shouldn't the reward for development of an innovation be in fact a competitive advantage? Isn't the very purpose of industrial research and development to create this advantage. If companies are managing their IP portfolios to achieve this, more power to them, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO!!!
Creating a competitive advantage is NOT the same thing as stifling innovation. The entire purpose of a patent is in fact to allow a company to use innovation to gain a competitive advantage. With IP, there would be no reward for the large investments that are often required to develop new technologies. Why would a company like IBM sink a billion dollars per year into it's world class R&D if as soon as they start manufacturing something Ziao-Chin Electronic could copy it and start selling it in competition to IBM??
Re:Soft PC, Virtual PC for Macintosh (Score:1)
Could be vaporware. If it was real, I'm sure I would have had opportunity to see it.
Supporting this notion, is the fact that I never ever read any reviews of it anywhere.
there has been alot of vaporware emulators for the mac
I didn't think, there had been that many emulators for the Mac, vaporware or otherwise. Other than Blue Light, the only emulators I ever heard of for Mac were all quite real.
Bochs (Score:2)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Re:Soft PC, etc aren't wine or VMware (Score:1)
I like Virtual PC's approach better. Emulate the hardware. Specify in the manual exactly what hardware is emulated. For instance, Virtual PC emulates a Pentium II, some S3 Trio video card, a DEC 21041 Ethernet on IRQ 11, etc. This is all useful information if you're trying to install, say, Linux onto Virtual PC.
I agree (mostly) with your remarks about it's speed. It's not super fast. But it's quite tollerable for short-term use. i.e. to perform the kind of tests I mentioned, or to diddle around with an OS in ways that could screw it up. If I screw up Virtual PC, it is just a simulation of a machine -- I don't have a real piece of hardware out of commission for hours and hours.
Concerning VMWare's implementation, I was reading many months ago about how something like this would have to be implemented. (Don't remember now if it was VMWare or something else.) But since Intel doesn't provide the virtualization capability, a lot of tricks have to be performed by VMWare. They have to actually scan all code before running it. When they run into certian constructs, they have to, so to speak, set a breakpoint there to stop the real host processor and trap back into VMWare's code. Yes, it's fast. But still, they have to advance scan the code. They keep track of what executable code has been scanned so that they don't do it twice. Wish I had a reference handy.
IBM has had virtual OS's .... (Score:1)
Oops! You just violated it. (Score:1)
bm :)-~
Re:Please, America (Score:1)
First, why is the advantage "competitive"? Why not call it "uncompetitive" advantage. But to answer the question: Because it stops others building on your work. And if you define "your work" broadly enough, it stops others from doing anything in the whole field. Which stifles inovation.
Re:Save 85% - 404 not found (Score:1)
Re:Soft PC, Virtual PC for Macintosh (Score:1)
When would that have come out?
Bootmanager (Score:2)
Re:Interesting contest idea (Score:2)
Re:Don't think so. (Score:1)
eudas
Re:nono (Score:2)
I would say if you are in a technological industry and don't want to put up a full scale website, then put up a very straightforward 'business card' site.
No freedom at all (Score:1)
Since VMWare is not free, as in free speech,(...)
IIRC, VMWare is not even free as in free beer.
--
Cracker Jack should have tried this! (Score:1)
How does this work, considering that they're not a publicly traded company? Apparently, like Travelzoo.com, this shows that they will probably never be publicly traded. I also like how they explicitly allow the reseller to pass the stock option on to the consumer. Isn't there a limit on the number of shareholders of a privately-held company in Texas? I thought it was something like 100 or so.
This, however, is a major problem if they are incorporated in Texas, because they are required to set the number of stock shares at time of incorporation. That means, if for some reason their product becomes spectularly popular, they will have to stop honoring the stock option coupons, or start buying back shares that were previously "sold."
Also, IANAL.
Re:This Depends (Score:2)
This happens to be one of the cases where they aren't considered people. People invent and assign to a corporation. A corporation can not, under current law, be an inventor.
Re:selling banner ads? (Score:1)
--bdj
Are you kidding? (Score:1)
Did you look at the whitepapers? (Score:5)
From their Homepage [flashvos.com]:
This looks like a BIOS-Bootmanager, it just activates the partition the OS you're interested in resides on, then let's you boot from that partition. Magic indeed.
Aah, a BIOS based bootmanager with APM - The state of your work is saved to disk, then you reboot.
Okay, that looks like a VMware done in hardware. Each OS is given a slice of the available RAM in which it can reside and run. You can switch between different Virtual-Machines. Okay, ther is no emulation layer in here, as all OSes are running on the actual hardware. When switching OSes, the OS you're switching from has to release all Hardware - that seems to be interesting. But that is "Phase III", so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Can't wait for that one - does anyone need a nice bridge? I own one I could sell :)
Ralph
Re:This Depends (Score:2)
They patents have been filled - not granted. The company that filled the patents was incoporated in 1998. Thus these patents cannot be older than that.
Nuff said.
Re:selling banner ads? (Score:1)
the patents have been filed... (Score:1)
hopefully the USPO will see prior art all over this and not grant them
Amazon was allowed their 'one-click checkout'! (Score:1)
Really, does one-click shopping seem like its revolutionary, or just a natural next-step in ecommerce technology? I believe it is the latter, and personally don't see any benifit to Amazon, their competitors or any other organization benifitting from this patent - that is unless Amazon decided to get into the ecommerce software buisiness. At least the technology is obtainable; better than only using it for their own personal benifit.
Virtual machine technology is revolutionary - its new at least, but seeing some of the bizarre patents over at http://www.patents.ibm.com/ [ibm.com], I'm really wouldn't be suprised to see this technology accessable to the first organization filing for a patent.
Re:VMware and code which must be emulated (Score:1)
You just have to decide which way to fail during the questionable cases. In this case, emulation is allways safe, so that is how you'd fail.
Another case of heuristic is garbage collection. Reference counting and reference tracing are heuristics. Often objects are provably unusable (if you look at the code, not just the data) even while there are still references to them.
Deciding for certain if a piece of data will be used becomes equivalent to the halting problem. But looking for a lack of references is an easy, fail-safe heuristic. When there is a lack of reference, the heuristic says drop it, and the heuristic is right. No reference implies no future access. But often you could have dropped it earlier - that implication is one way.
Re:Please, America (Score:1)
When the patent office awards patents for methods and processes that are obvious to any skilled practitioner in the field covered by the patent, competition is stifled. The patent office has been all too willing to allow this, through incompetence and/or ignorance. People can't patent the wheel, because even the patent office knows that there is prior art for that. But it may not be so obvious to them in the case of software and other technology patent applications, that prior art exists. A lot of recent patents in the technology fields are as obvious as the wheel - Amazon's one-click patent is a fine example. This is a patent that was sought solely for the purpose of institgating litigation to stifle competition. Rambus patents on existing memory technology is another example. Toshiba and others have already kow-towed to the legal threat, and will now pay licensing fees to Rambus for products they have been manufacturing since before Rambus was incorporated. Others, like Micron, aren't buying it, and are fighting it in court. There can be no rational argument in favor of allowing Amazon or Rambus to patent the obvious, yet they did it.
Re:They need to get a clue (Score:1)
eudas
Re:You'd have to be a bit more specific (Score:1)
eudas
Re: IBM is the first? (Score:1)
Upgrades (Score:1)
What if I'm not using VOS? If I see no reason to upgrade my operating system then I wont! If I want to upgrade for a bug fix, or I want a new feature in the new system then I'll upgrade, but what does VOS have to do with any of this?
I'm confused at what they are getting at here, my guess is that they mean you don't have to re-install your operating system to change it, but I think they should be more clear on this, especially if they are trying to sell this! I can just see someone thinking that if they have this they no longer have to upgrade from say Windows 98 to Windows ME because VOS will do it for them.
Re:I was wondering... (Score:1)
Re:Soft PC, Virtual PC for Macintosh (Score:1)
Hmm. (Score:2)
System/88 History (Score:2)
In the old days, VOS machines ran on m68k chips. Later, they made versions that ran on the obscure Intel i860 RISC chips. Nowdays, Continuum servers run on PA-RISC chips. (A humorous note is that a common high-volume networking card used in Stratus boxen is the IBM Arctic 960, which uses the i860's descendent, the i960 chip.) There was some effort to work towards moving to IA-64 before the buy-out by Ascend, but Ascend got the rights to that platform. I'm real sure the server half of Stratus that got split off is really crying about that one nowdays.
There was also a short-lived fault-tolerant ultra-redundant Windows NT machine called 'Radio' that won an award at Comdex the year it was debuted. However, no one wanted to pay the price for fault-tolerant hardware when the OS wasn't guaranteed to be nearly as stable. Heh.
Tandem is a whole other ballpark. Ugly, hideous OS. Much, much worse than VOS.
Ah, it feels good to reminisce...
No Such Trademark (Score:1)
Oh, never mind... FlashVOS cancelled [uspto.gov] their 1988 VOS trademark. Oh.. and Stratus VOS [uspto.gov] also was cancelled, in 1991.
Re:Did you look at the whitepapers? (Score:1)
Re:Interesting contest idea (Score:1)
(If you build a better mousetrap, someone will sue you.
-jeff
Re:I was wondering... (Score:2)
Not Listed in Patent Office (Score:1)
Re:The patent will pass and IBM will do nothing (Score:2)
Also, it's meaningless to say 'countries that laugh at US patent laws' in that they are irrelevant to patents in almost every country.
If you want patents in the UK, Japan, etc, you must file them in each country. There are some short cuts, i.e. you can file European patents and International patents, but these must eventually 'fork' into country-specific patents at later stages of the process. Patents don't automatically cross national boundaries, like trademarks but unlike copyright.
Did you read their page? (Score:1)
re: patent pending?? (Score:1)
If it comes to the crunch (Score:1)
My royalties please. (Score:1)
You lot owe me loadsa cash now ;)
Re:Have you seen this? (Score:1)
//rdj
Bzzt... Thanks for playing.. (Score:2)
Virtual OS is not Virtual machine (Score:2)
not OS emulator. It emulates an x86-like computer on which you can add a new OS.
In that sense, it would be rather Wine in full OS emulation mode that would be impacted by this patents.
Win4Lin - yet another virtual OS system (Score:1)
Since nobody's mentioned Win4Lin [trelos.com] by TreLOS, I guess I'd better do it. It's yet another virtual OS system, but it only runs Win9x (the real Redmond beast) on Linux. The advantage compared to WMware is that it does it really fast - the performance is really comparable to native Windows. A truly amazing experience when you boot Windows in an X window with five large apps and it still only takes 30MB of memory and doesn't slow down either itself or Linux. Don't try that with your Windows 98! :) Win4Lin lives in the Linux filesystem which makes transferring files between the OSes a breeze. The major drawback is the poorly documented install, which requires a kernel patch.
I was considering buying it (for $35) until I heard that WINE can finally run Lotus Notes. Win4Lin also freezes my whole system when I try to run my other main Windows app - Deluxe Ski Jump...
open source: disclose early, disclose often (Score:2)
This will protect the ideas from getting patented before you get around to implementing them. It may help infringement claims even after you have written the code, since a disclosure may be looked on more favorably by the courts than a few thousand lines of code.
As for these specific patents, once their patents are filed, there is really little that can be done. Let's hope that the ample prior art in IBM, Bochs, VMWare, emulators, and Plex86 will be sufficient to strike any claims from the patents that interfere with free software once they are issued.
I meant VM (Score:2)
Re:Wouldn't that hurt performance? (Score:2)
This entirely depends, and I have a great example from back in my VM/ESA system programmer days.
Let's say you have an operating system that works very well when it has enough memory to keep everything in storage, but performs poorly when it has to page/swap out tasks.
Now you run it under a virtual machine program that is very, very efficient at paging/swapping.
You can, and often do, get better performance this way than if you were running the virtualized operating system on the bare hardware.
We ran MVS under VM this way. The real machine had 32 megs of storage. (this was a while back.) By running MVS under VM, and giving the MVS machine a virtual storage size of 128 megs, the VM software smoothly paged, the MVS software never entered its paging routines, and we realized a substantial performance improvement. The combined system actually used less CPU and performed less I/O then the MVS system alone.
Another situation is where the virtual machine environment has access to resources that the virtualized operating systems don't. A year or so after we put MVS under VM, we purchased a new mainframe with "expanded storage" -- a chunk of high-speed RAM that is tightly connected to the processor -- you use it for first level paging. i.e. When you page data out to disk, instead of writing it directly to the swap space, instead you find the oldest page in expanded storage and write that page out to disk, then page the block into expanded storage.
Thrashing is typically caused by rapid page out/in combinations. You page something out, then decide you need it again immediately, but you have to wait for the disk to come around again.
Even though our MVS kernel was written before expanded storage hardware was invented, we were able to use it to improve MVS performance; another example of how a well designed, well balanced virtual machine supervisor can improve the performance of the machines it supervises above and beyond their bare-iron performance.
Counterintuitive, but true!
Re:Did you look at the whitepapers? (Score:2)
Wasting your time... (Score:2)
Any details in the title, abstract, description, etc are only there to help a skilled practitioner reproduce the invention (under license), or to invent something new that doesn't infringe the claims.
Re:Wouldn't that hurt performance? (Score:2)
Overall it is a great product, but it's not for people who want extremely high performance without providing extra hardware to run it well.
VMware has patents too (Score:2)
And it actually has a product, not that this means anything in patent wars...
Re:Wouldn't that hurt performance? (Score:2)
They need to get a clue (Score:2)
Can take two computers and put all their components on a split screen on the same computer. Makes two computer households obsolete.
"Honey, could you press the escape key for me, and stop hogging he 'E'"
Presents key system peripherals to multiple Run Time OS's at the same time, while each OS can totally be satisfied with its virtual device as a complete physical drive
wow, I would love to see my mouse as a complete physical drive
It [Flash VOS] gives the user the capability of running an application without an Operating System running at all. Many applications do not need an Operating System to make them run. With Flash Vos(TM) Super O/S, you can click on the application you wish to use and begin working.
No operating system at all? I am starting to get the idea this is a bad translation.
Management is one of the basic functions included in Flash Vos(TM) Super O/S.
Does one get a PHB for free?
In a bulletted list of advantages:
- protect user data from predatory/monopolistic behavior of traditional OS's
Is that the OS or the company that makes the OS?
Flash Vos, Inc., a Texas Corporation, was incorporated in Highlands, Texas in April 1998. Its business is internal in scope and intended to invent, design, develop and distribute the technology and products associated with the next generation of super operating systems.
Internal in scope? "Invent, design, develop"? Was this written by a bad resume writing program? Why not a Super-Duper OS?
Either they need to hire a better technical writer, or they let the marketting droids lose to develop the techical content of their web site. Or perhaps they don't know what they are talking about.
-josh
The patent will pass and IBM will do nothing (Score:3)
The patent will remain until it is challenged in court and defeated, and it's almost impossible to overthrow a patent in court. The 800 lb gorillas can't start anything unless VOS tries to enforce the patent against them.
The end result? VOS gets the perfect weapon with which to kill off smaller competitors as long as they leave IBM and the like alone. The IBM bean counters won't authorize a legal battle over the patent just to keep a few Open Source projects alive. To them, it's not worth the expense. Plex86 is either killed off or developed only by people who live in countries that laugh at US patent laws. VMWare will probably be safe, but if VOS develops an attitude and gets some venture capital behind their legal department, VMWare will be toast.
Matthew Miller, [50megs.com]
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
Sure was neat though.
Re:This Depends (Score:2)
However, the patent office is notoriously bad at investigating prior art. They basically just look at existing patents, not "what's out there in the real world". Second problem is that there's no requirement that the patent examiner of record actually be "skilled in the art". The PTO was issuing software patents for 10-15 years before they had any actual examiners with software engineering credentials, and seem to be even further over the edge on business practice patents.
Here's one heinous example I know about. I was a technical consultant to an employer's legal team going up against an IBM suit -- basically, they wanted access to all our technology, so they came after us with a stack of patents. One of these, filed in _1984_!, claimed to patent nothing more or less complex than cut and paste of text between multiple buffers in a text editor. Since our computer shipped with MicroEmacs, we violated this "invention". Never mind that the exact same sequence of keystrokes would have achieved the exact same effect in TECO Emacs, which I was using at CMU back in '79 (derived from earlier versions done at MIT...).
Sure, you can fight a patent with prior art, but the presumption is usually that the patent was researched fully. Clearly an increasingly bad assumption, but that's what you'll find in the system.
So yes, there is some danger here.
Please, America (Score:2)
In particular:
"There are several ways companies can leverage their IP to create a distinct market advantage, Gross said. Companies should not only protect unique parts of their current technologies, but "patent in paths where their technology is headed," he said, thereby creating a competitive advantage."
"Gross also suggested that companies create patents with "an eye on infringement," to make sure that a patent can't be infringed and to make a company aware if one of its patents is being infringed upon. If a company feels it has the best technology or method in its field, it should not only patent that technology or method, but also the second-, third-, and fourth-best methods to ensure a competitive advantage, he said."
Please, America, feel free to screw up your own high-tech industries in the legal equivalent of the "Unix wars", but leave the rest of us out of it (i.e. don't try to push laws on us via WIPO, hoping nobody will notice).
Re:Don't think so. (Score:2)
In my opinion the American patent model is very good, leaving as much of the judging to the justice system as posssible. The cost, time and loss of skill that would go into the patent office having a staff that could understand every patent is unreasonable, and dispite what slashdot might say it is a very effective way around that.
Oh, and in response to everyone who has said that the patent office is 'stupid', just because they do not have a staff skilled in computers does not mean they are stupid. It amazes me that so many people believe that just because they are good with them, that computer skill is the final judge of intellegence.
VOS!! Obscure OS's rock! (Score:2)
VOS is about the opposite of UNIX in command-line structure. The default command (without abbreviations) for changing a directory is 'change_current_dir'. This is kind of an interesting throwback to the COBOL and PL/I roots of the original OS back in the old days. Compare this to the C-based design of UNIX's command shell.
The really cool thing about VOS is it's utter and complete fault tolerance. The machines they run on have dual motherboards, mirrored drives, etc. so that if one component goes wrong, it immediately switches over to the other one and calls Stratus customer support to log a request for a replacement part. If you don't spend a lot of time in your server room or reading logs, the arrival of a new motherboard in the mail may be the first sign you have that one has failed in your machine.
VOS also lets you virtually partition your whole machine in a variety of ways. Multiple motherboards or even the same motherboard can be host to several 'modules' or virtual machines which can communicate with each other and share resources. Modules on the same machine may even be on seperate server boxes, linked by serial, modem, TCP/IP, or other more obscure networking methods.
Another VOS strength is its support for various ancient networking protocols. The most common service our company's software provided was to set up a fault-tolerant means of data exchange between legacy systems and the modern world. VOS was a bizarre beast, but I really liked it in many ways.
Re: IBM is the first? (Score:2)
Based on the broken graphics tags and totally amateurish implementation of their website I wouldn't expect much of their product or their ability to defend patents that might conflict with IBM's... but what do I know I'm just an (O)S/390 guy.
----
Re:This Depends (Score:2)
-Dan
Has anyone actually used this 'product'? (Score:2)
Maybe its just me. I have geek interests, and yet I have never heard of this company or their product before. The details on their website are very sketchy. There are no downloads, the pages look very second-rate, and their on-line ordering isn't over SSL. There are broken images everywhere, where you would expect pictures of flashy shrink-wrap. The user manual for this 'super o/s' is full of screen-shots of a DOS app running in a Win9x comand window. And although they claim to be a US company, the text gives the feeling it was written by someone who doesn't often use the English language.
OK, I am a constant skeptic. Is it just me, or does this look like a hoax to anyone else? Isn't it the sort of thing one would expect to have seen a feature on at a geek site like Ars Technica [ars-technica.com]? Can anyone present any evidence that this is real?
Re:Not "The whole discipline" (Score:3)
Basically "unsafe" code in this context is any code that tries to access hardware (should be possible to trap with the MMU), and code that uses some x86 trickery to find out which "ring" they run in, which is impossible to properly virtualize, and has to be emulated.
Since the "unsafe" code cases are fairly uncommon, this delivers a significant performance boost over emulating all instructions...
Interesting contest idea (Score:5)
How about someone starts a competition to come up with something the USPO wouldn't allow. The funnier the better. If the word got out to the mainstream media as a filler item, it might even make a useful point to the masses and their masters on The Hill.
Of course, we'd have to have a prize worth noting, so it would need some rich sponsor with an interest in the topic (Hello, RedHat; VA Linux?).
Rational debate isn't working with the PO, so maybe it's time to make fun of them in public.
TWW
Re:Can anybody say OS2 (Score:2)
I'm fairly sure that's not the case. Win/OS2 was more akin to WINE than to VMWare - a port of the Windows API rather than a virtual machine. (Port, because IBM had access to the Windows source - WINE do not have that luxury, so it's a reimplementation)
--
Re:Not "The whole discipline" (Score:2)
The have FILED patents? WooHoo! (Score:2)
Also, where does all this stuff about patents hindering innovation come from? Innovation is all about hte development of new ideas, NOT the copying of stuff that has already been done (patented or not). It seems to me that patents in fact encourage innovation by forcing people wanting to compete to develop new original technologies rather than just copying work that has already been done (and paid for in terms of support for R&D and a lot of hard work). Whithout patents all you would have is endless copying as soon as a new idea hit the market, with the inventors getting nothing for their original work.
Re:The have FILED patents? WooHoo! (Score:2)
So, should we grant them a monopoly over the virtual machine market for the x86 for being the first to market and doing an OK engineering job? I don't think so. Doing so would inhibit genuine innovation and increase costs.
While one can make an argument that protecting new ideas with patents encourages innovation, merely handing out monopolies on market niches clearly does not. Quite to the contrary: it keeps others from coming up with genuinely new ideas in a particular market segment, it makes the company holding the patent complacent, and it represents government interference with the mechanisms of the free market.
Re:Don't think so. (Score:2)
Well then what do you propose as a better way to do it. Random 'experts' in the field deciding the fait of companies and individuals. Like it or not the legal system in the most fair and least biased way to deal with issues such as this.
Computer skills, no. Common sense, yes. The patent office grants patents for such drivel as faster than light communication and extracting energy from other dimensions to increase plant-growth. All you need to do is to make a trivial invention seem very complex. The patent office lacks common sense and time. Anybody with a highschool-diploma and 15 minutes of time could have dismissed the above patent. The USPO did not.OK,OK. (Score:2)
All right, I give up. You've obviously got me out-lawyered. So you get ten percent of the profits I make on this and all subsequent /. posts. If that's not good enough I'll even let you have twenty percent. But not one penny more!
Have fun cavorting with all them super-duper-models on your new yacht!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's a PR page (Score:2)
posting that story violated their "copyright" (Score:2)
CONFIDENTIAL: The information disclosed herein regarding the Flash Vos(TM) includes confidential, proprietary information of Flash Vos Inc. This document, and the contents thereof, may not be used, reproduced, transmitted, transferred to other documents, or disclosed to any person or entity, in whole or in part, without the prior express written consent of Flash Vos Inc. The Flash Vos(TM) is covered by a United States Pending Patent Application. All rights are reserved to Flash Vos Inc.
So
Re:Don't think so. (Score:2)
You really only need to understand one thing to comprehend US patent law. The people who grant patents (especially software patents) have the intelligence of cauliflower. Therefore, you can patent anything that hasn't already been patented. I could apply for a patent on the process of rubbing two sticks together to make fire, and it would probably be granted. (Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have said that, because now someone will actually do it. I think I should just go ahead and flee the country now.)
IBM is the first? (Score:2)
Prior Art (Score:4)
When faced with a set of patents like this, you have to hope that there is an 800lb gorilla out there who might take exception. Given that IBM's S/390 machines are just about as good as you can get in Virtual Machines either through VMs or LPIs, anything which seriously treads on the toes of IBMs patents in this field is likely to get short shrift in the legal arena. That said, this is already a heavily patented area - a quick search of the patent database [ibm.com] pulls up 245 patents on this issue. Which is pretty scary given that these patents, as with so many patent applications, aim to be as broad as possible in their presentation.
So much for propelling innovation forward...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Not "The whole discipline" (Score:3)
IBM's VM (AKA OS/390) has been doing virtual machines for longer than most Slashdot readers have had a computer. Emulators (and I was playing with XZX as long ago as 1995 -- it probably was around a while before then) are essentially no different.
All VMware did that was clever was to virtualise an x86. Virtualise (as opposed to emulate) because it does not need to emulate CPU operations, merely pass them on to to the real CPU. An S/390 is designed to facilitate this. For reasons I don't understand personally, apparently a PC isn't particularly friendly to this approach, so VMware did a great job in pulling it off.
I really like VMware, I use it every day (to run Lotus Notes. Bah.) - a Free equivalent would be lovely.
--
Re:A patent? (Score:2)
A patent the patent office would not grant:
Method for Calculation through Graphite Scratches on Dead Trees (also known as pencil-and-paper calculations)
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Virtual OS in the 1970s (Score:3)
Re:Did you look at the whitepapers? (Score:2)
The third one looks like the same thing, but faster and more wasteful of memory. It doesn't look like real "multitasking" of OSes -- rather, they're "task-switched" and don't do anything when not active.
And the fourth looks just a little beyond where VMware is today.
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I was wondering... (Score:2)
To print, you crease a virtual printer, to read cards, yoou create a virtual card reader, if you needed memory, you create a new virtual machine with more virtual memory.
I used VMS under VM370 in 1981. I think that is before 2000, but maybe I made a Y2k error on my math.
Re:Did you look at the whitepapers? (Score:2)
I thought mouse-warping at the edge of the screen was annoying. But my computer rebooting? And they got a patent for this?
Prior Art, from 1986 (Score:2)
I have an old used Mac IIci, which came with some old version of this SoftPC on it. I just booted it up, and the "About SoftPC" from the "Apple Menu", says "Version 1.4: (EGA/AT) © 1986-1990 Insignia Solutions" I'm not sure if they really sold a product before 1988, but anyone who's going to try and claim a patent on the invention of a virtual machine is going to have a lot of prior art to deal with.
Of course, there are a number of well written, and well moderated (up) posts suggesting that their patents might not be as broad as Rod hinted, and maybe the whole thing is a hoax.... but if anyone's looking for some prior art, I've got an ancient mac that's in danger of being completely replaced with ARDI's Mac Emulator [ardi.com], also some nice Prior Art, perhaps even as old as Insignia's SoftPC, but was only released commercially a couple years ago.
Will the Patent Office grant it? Yes (Score:2)
Have you seen this? (Score:2)
If you take a look at the bottom of the page reffered to in the story you find this:
"CONFIDENTIAL: The information disclosed herein regarding the Flash Vos(TM) includes confidential, proprietary information of Flash Vos Inc. This document, and the contents thereof, may not be used, reproduced, transmitted, transferred to other documents, or disclosed to any person or entity, in whole or in part, without the prior express written consent of Flash Vos Inc. The Flash Vos(TM) is covered by a United States Pending Patent Application. All rights are reserved to Flash Vos Inc."
What does this mean?
Who wants yet another OS? (Score:2)
I'd rather have a real OS interacting with my system first, and then maybe something on top. I wonder what the security implications are of running their 'OS' first, and then running OpenBSD on top... Um... Any takers?
With a web design background, and site that has page 22, page 23, etc., as it's page names, scares the crap out of me. If they can't do a real web site, what's the customer support like. (Anyone remember which program spits pages out like that by default?)
Vmware and IBM will flame grill them (Score:3)
IBM, Intel, Miscrosoft and Digital(now compaq) have enough prior art, IP and even patents as well as financial resources to simply roast them and eat at their leasure.
IMHO: They have taken laisurely pace towards Vmware and Plex86 because they have not attempted to file IP and bite them. This is different story. The patents have been filed. The IP war tomahawks have been dug out.
Plex86 and Vmware should simply wait until the legal ICBMs will hit on target and the legal fallout has finished.
That is if any of the patents that make any impact will actually succeed. As of now patent search return not found on all of them.
Self-virtualisation (Score:2)
My decade-plus old copy of Tannenbaum (Operating Systems: Principles and Pracice -- old enough to describe the PDP11 and System 370) describes this in some detail, and it sounds a bit like what they're trying to patent.
Patent office screw-up: film at eleven ...
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
I'm not sure if Ascend or Stratus (which is now privately held) own the rights to the "VOS" name. The thought of these going for a patent and being sued over the name at the same time reeks of poetic justice.
Re:Soft PC, Virtual PC for Macintosh (Score:3)
It pre-dates the PowerMacintosh which appeared in 1994. (That is, Soft PC ran on the Motorola 68000 processor.) When the PowerMac version came out, it was named SoftWindows.
IIRC, SoftPC goes back at least a couple if not more years than the PowerMac (1994).
Later Connectix came out with Virtual PC, which IMHO is a much more useful product (see below). Whereas SoftPC/SoftWindows take a lot of shortcuts and install specialized Windows drivers to enhance performance, Connectix's Virtual PC tries to truly emulate the PC hardware -- upon which you can install any OS. Virtual PC is more like VMWare, while Soft PC is slightly closer to WINE. I would date Virtual PC to be at least 5 years old.
There was another emulator product for Mac about the 1995 timeframe called Blue Light. I've never seen it, so I can't say much. But all this taken together should provide some prior art.
I've successfully installed SuSE 5.2, 6.x, Win NT 4 Server Enterprise Edition, Win NT 4 Workstation, Win 95 osr2, Win 98, 98SE, Win 2000 on Virtual PC. Haven't had time to try WinME.
[Why? Because it is the most wonderful testing environment you can imagine. I can fsck with the registry or other windows internals with total impunity. I can copy a previously backed up Drive C image from a CDROM in 4 minutes and have a totally virgin install of the OS back again. Wonderful QA tool. QA dept. can have a disk wallet full of CD's containing Virtual PC drive images with virgin installs of all your un-favorite OS's with various permutations of service packs, etc., all properly licensed. What OS do you want to fsck with today? Plus, I can install some screwball game, and do a before and after comparison of the entire hard drive image (using Mac tools outside the PC environment, to avoid Hiesenbug-type problems). I've even got drive snapshots of NT inbetween all the zillion reboots you have to perform during it's installation. Now if only Connectix would release a debug version that would allow me to stop the emulated processor in between instructions -- this would be the equivalent of hardware debugging from the perspective of the Guest OS. But I digress.
Hoax Research (Score:4)
A link: search on Alta-Vista turns up Pearl 9 Design [rr.com] which lists Flash VOS as a client. Pearl 9 Design has a mission statement that states, "Endeavor to bear standards beyond the ordinary." And looking at their site and the FlashVOS site, their concept of ordinary must be really low.
Secondly, the other clients Pearl 9 List, don't exist (or at least the links don't work). Looking at who FlashVOS lists as business partners and the list on Pearl 9 clients...I see a large amount of overlap.
Seeing that this looks like a big ol' hoax, and the fact that they are taking credit card orders, I suspect something malicious. From the broken links, the lack of anything to download, the lack of a user guide, the lack of screenshots, one can oly conclude that this is a pure vaporware site, or something criminal. I've written to the President of Flash VOS to have him contact Slashdot to verify his company's product (which is selling for just $30!).
Re:This Depends (Score:2)
A patent? (Score:2)
Or do you think that the patent office would not grant such patent?
Let's see: one click shopping, international e-commerce... It's difficult to imagine a patent that the patent office wouldn't grant...
Michael
A glance at the patents (Score:4)
However, here's the list of the patents they claim to have filed. So, if they are overbroad, they may be caught by the patent offic and not be granted [0].
The flash based part here I think is critical. Rembeber that patents are very specific. A flip down mouthpeice on a phone is not the same as a flip up ear piece. Thus, this seems to restrict it to using flash only. Precisly what innovation it has (other than standard viruliasation and journalling) I'm not certain of, but I don't belive that this will be a problem.
Um, lost on the techincal bits of virtualisation on this one. It sounds fairly over broad.
Not certain what they mean by restrictive partioning, as apposed to 'ordinary' partioning. Google is confused on it too.
These say they are OS specific. Shouldn't be a problem.
[0] Yeah, right.
Re:Wouldn't that hurt performance? (Score:2)
The answer, is yes. As for the level of performance degredation, that I couldn't tell you exactly, and would think it would vary between applications and OSes. You're correct, the more levels of software between a process (the kernel, an application, a daemon, etc), the slower that process is due to having to move through the layers to get the to actual hardware. Rather than go Application -> Kernel -> Hardware, a machine with VMware would go Application -> Kernel -> VMware -> hardware. One extra step, and thus a loss of performance, no matter how small.
Unless the software package (the VMware-esque program) is poorly written, the performance loss is usually not noticable to the end user based on experiences I've heard about. The large exception to this rule is games, where speed and direct hardware access are everything.