I just got an email from VMWare announcing the new "VMWare Player":http://www.vmware.com/download/player. As the name implies, it allows anyone who downloads the free player to run virtual machines created w/ VMWare Workstation. The download site seems to be pretty heavily loaded, so I've not had a chance to review its limitations, but if they're reasonable, this could be huge. Perhaps some enterprising group will create a stock Windows XP image, activate all the DRM players on it, and share it the world over for communal music/video access. Already, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Red Hat, et al are offering prefab VMs for evaluation purposes, which has significant appeal for both the vendor and the client. Clients don't get stuck w/ reams of resource-hungry eval-ware bogging down their primary machines, and vendors don't have to support the half-upgraded Windows 98 bastard box which inevitably someone will run an eval on. Now, if only they were smaller, and not monolithic; in other words, I'd like to be able to download pre-installed components which could just be folded into an existing VM, but I'm not sure how that would work anyway. Update: It's even better than I thought: bq. On Windows hosts, VMware Player also opens and runs Microsoft® Virtual PC and Virtual Server virtual machines and Symantec® LiveState Recovery system images. Kickass! Some limitations: * VMware Player does not support Virtual SMP. You cannot use VMware Player to power on a virtual machine that has more than one virtual processor assigned. * VMware Player can run only one virtual machine at a time. You must close the virtual machine currently running in VMware Player before you can open another virtual machine. And, obviously, you can't create new virtual machines. Still, I'm amazed VMWare is giving away so much virtualization technology. They've really thrown down the gauntlet to MS with its too-little-too-late Virtual PC offering.