Publishing VM Images

BitTorrents for Images > 500 MB

Sun employees only: The .Sun Engineering organization maintains a farm of BitTorrent servers for use by organizations throughout Sun for hosting their own BitTorrent offerings. The BitTorrent Details document describes the details of our appliance-specific publishing location. Please read this document prior to requesting rights to publish to the download area.

Images < 500 MB

Sun employees only: Sun's [mediacast.sun.com] site is expressly for Sun employees to post large files to the outside world publicly.  See http://mediacast.sun.com. However, it is limited to downloads of 500 MB or less in size.

Appliance Directories

Once you've hosted your images, you'll want to ensure that they are represented in some of the popular appliance directories.

Sun Virtual Appliance Directory Entry Template

Other Directories:

• VMware Appliance Marketplace
• Parallels Virtual Appliances Directory
• VirtualBox Images
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
• rBuilder Online

Legal Considerations

When a user decides to install a piece of SW (it could be an OS, a middleware product or a SW application), the user typically needs to accept a license agreement as part of the installation process. This agreement determines the legal relation between the user and the owner of the SW (and the SW itself). When we deploy VM images, we assume that several SW building blocks are pre-installed on the image, so that the user doesn't need to go through the installation process, neither he/she needs to accept a license agreement for every single piece of SW that is pre-installed. We need a way of setting legal terms for the usage of the SW that is part of VM images. Different types of VM images or different ways of deployments of those images may need different approaches to licensing.

Desktop-based images

• A license could be displayed when the user first starts the desktop. Much like OpenSolaris 2008.05 does today.

Deployment-oriented images

• TBD: How to ensure a proper licensing scheme and process for VM images that are an integral part of a PaaS environment, like AmazonEC2 or 3tera. The license acceptance could be integrated into a temporary start up service such that it gets displayed during the start up process. Alternatively, the license could be displayed during first log in via the command line.
• Click here for the example of the license for the OpenSolaris AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that is part of the AMazon EC2 infrastructure. This is a license that users need to accept through the web, when they register the image for usage.

Dependency on the SW distribution

• TBD: Licensing schemes and processes for VM images may vary dependently on distribution schemes of bundled SW - a VM images tha includes only freely redistributable, should be freely redistributable to.

How to license a VM image that combines SW from many different vendors

• TBD