Thursday 4 September 2008

Qumranet Acquisition - what does it mean for SPICE?

Sure I'm the 100th blogger to chime in on the Red Hat acquisition of Qumranet, however one thing that seems to be escaping the press is the completely proprietary nature of the SPICE protocol, which is really what made Qumranet stand out from the other KVM based solutions on the market (that and the fact that they were the sole commercial sponsor of the KVM project, the same that Parallels is the sponsor of OpenVZ).

I met Moshe Bar earlier this year, and asked him if SPICE was intrinsic to KVM, and if not why not license it to other vendors in the VDI space. His reply was that they could indeed re-engineer and license SPICE to any vendor, however doing so would pretty much kill the rest of their offering. If Red Hat open source SPICE, there could be some interesting developments in the remote display protocol / broker space indeed. I don't know how many of you have seen SPICE running live, but it's pretty darn impressive!