Canonical and IBM have announced the release of a new virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C database software, the free community edition of IBM's DB2, running on the Ubuntu cloud platform

Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable.

Here’s an interesting bit of news from the blurred line between open and closed source software. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it is reselling IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as both a standalone software package and as a software appliance with VMware. While Express-C is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech. Of course, if you want support it is not free at all.

Canonical and IBM, as expected, have expanded their relationship. The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there's a deeper story angle here... involving Canonical's continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here's the speculation.

TurnKey Linux, an Ubuntu based project, recently announced its largest release to date, which includes 25 new additions to its free virtual appliance library featuring some of the world's best open source software. Support has been added for Amazon EC2 cloud and the OVF virtual appliance format.

When I first found VirtualBox and created my first Virtual Machine VirtualBox was still owned by a small company in Germany. Few people know of the project and fewer thought it was a good idea to build and distribute pre-installed virtual machines.

When Asterisk sponsor Digium, Inc. released AsteriskNOW, early in January 2007, the stated aim was to provide an open-source telephony "appliance." Not appliance as in hardware/software combo, but appliance as in 'all the software you need to get a complete telephony application up and running'—even if you don't know a lot about Linux administration.

Virtual Bridges’ new VERDE 2.0 now integrates client-side hypervisor for offline PC use. Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical announced today the immediate availability of the newest version of a Linux-server based virtual desktop with the release of Virtual Bridges’ VERDE 2.0 software.

Yankee Group has said that virtual appliances will enable the delivery of better-quality software and an improved user experience. The virtual appliance is an emerging new development for the software industry.