[gobolinux-users] Application virtualization and GoboLinux

[Rayne Van-Dunem]

Hi, haven't posted here in a bit. I just wanted to ask a question in regards
to the application
virtualization<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualization>
/streaming <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_streaming> idea that's
being implemented by klik, 0install, and other virtual machines, and how it
may relate to GoboLinux.

Now, I have very little evidence to back this assumption up, but I think
that OS X's Aqua layer was the first consumer usage of application
virtualization, in which NeXT's
bundles<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_%2528NEXTSTEP%2529>(similar
to ROX's
AppDirs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_directory>) were
virtualized to work only within the Aqua layer, and not on the core Darwin
OS; the same goes for their HFS+, which I doubt that you'd see as the
default file system in Darwin.

Last year, Microsoft bought Softricity, and released
SoftGrid<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SoftGrid>,
which is an application-centric addition to their virtualization product
line (VirtualPC, etc.). And now the next version of
klik<http://klik.atekon.de/>is in development, which is supposed to
use FUSE by default rather than
loopmount; a Red Hat employee just developed his own version of
it<http://www.gnome.org/%7Ealexl/glick/>earlier this month.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, these baby steps toward
virtualization, and while I can't say that this is a trend outside the
corporate world, I do think that it's inevitable that virtualization will
catch on, just further down the road.

But if and when it does, do you think that the GoboLinux model will be a
good model on which to build the virtualizations?

I'm thinking something like: having a Debian system with an XFCE desktop,
with a virtualized GoboLinux file system and application layer, in which you
can easily create AppDirs and recipes from tar.gz, and then share the
applications with others through a distributed p2p network on the klik://
protocol.

What do you think? Is that something that you could see happening in the
future?

Rayne
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