Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.
replies(3):
You mention having a "virtual block-based file system". How easily can people integrate other devices into the VM, including custom devices? For instance, if someone had a different network filesystem they wanted to use, which could be tunneled over WebSocket or WebTransport, how easily could they integrate that into this? What's the equivalent of virtio here?
It looks like the client-side bits are largely proprietary? Is CheerpX the primary thing you consider to be your competitive advantage, or is it more about all the layers you're putting on top of that for things like Flash and Java and Oracle Forms and converting local apps to web apps?
It'd be nice to be able to build atop the underlying VM and extend it for all sorts of purposes, the way KVM has been open enough to become a focal point for the modern cloud, and have just the enterprise-y bits and "convert your local app to a web app" framework running on top of that being proprietary.
CheerpX is indeed proprietary, but free-to-use for individuals and open source projects. We do want to see the community building on top of our tech. Our Flash product is build on top of CheerpX and the official Flash player plugin that needs to be licensed separately from Harman/Adobe. Java support is provided by a completely different product called CheerpJ, although lots of the ideas and parts of the JIT engines are shared with CheerpX.
At this stage we believe that keeping CheerpX proprietary serves our growth plans the best, this could of course change over time as adoption increases and we build further added-value products on top. On the other hand the WebVM integration is FOSS since it doubles as an extensive sample of what can you build with our technology.
I was thinking more about arbitrary custom devices, like custom network drivers (e.g. to connect to a server-side virtual network rather than tailscale) or custom filesystem drivers at either the block or FS layer.
> At this stage we believe that keeping CheerpX proprietary serves our growth plans the best, this could of course change over time as adoption increases and we build further added-value products on top.
I'd be very interested in chatting with you about our respective products' future plans.
Sure, you can find me and the rest of the team on Discord: https://discord.leaningtech.com