SUNNY CALIFORNIAN firm Sun Microsystems of Java and OpenOffice.org fame announced yesterday its intention to acquire German software firm Innotek Systemberatung GmbH. The outfit specialises in virtualisation software with its Virtualbox x86 line.

Ironically, this German firm was the company which about six years ago ported Virtual PC version 5.x to the IBM OS/2 platform, allowing Warp users for the first time to run 32-bit windows under OS/2 as a host. Of course, once the Microsoft Vole set its sights on Connectix' virtualisation technology, the first thing it did was to kill the OS/2 hosted version.

Innotek is also responsible for developing several OS/2 software pieces that greatly extended the life of the venerable OS: a new font engine adding fonts dithering, and updated versions for OS/2 of the Windows Acrobat Reader, the Citrix ICA client, and OpenOffice.org, some of which are included in the Ecomstation third party OS/2 distribution.

This isn't the first time Sun has ended up with some legacy OS/2 products in its portfolio. When the firm acquired Stardivision GmbH's Staroffice product, the suite included a very powerful, native OS/2 version, and for a couple years Sun released its "freeware" Staroffice with Windows, Linux, Solaris *and* an OS/2 version on the same CD.

After some time, the code was released under a GPL licence for everyone to use and Openoffice.org was born, the OS/2 version was dropped.

So what does this Innotek deal means for Sun?. It means it acquired a great *and* user-friendly virtualisation solution that, unlike Solaris Zones, runs on almost every popular OS out there. VirtualBox is open sauce, free as in "free beer" and works across Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris OS(s). It supports running from 16-bit Windows through Vista, Linux with kernels 2.2 to 2.6, Solaris x86, Netware, and yes, even OS/2.

VirtualBox is available in beta versions for Mac OSX and OpenSolaris hosts. Long time OS/2 advocate Paul Smedley has even ported the code to run under an OS/2 host, the last version of which was released on Monday.

About the legacy OS/2-centric products from Innotek, we're sure they'll be kept around for some time, due to the interest of OS/2 distributor eComstation. µ