Canonical’s Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today’s Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it’s now fully open-source.
Multipass relies on KVM for virtualization on Linux, Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows, and QEMU under macOS for running virtual machines (VMs) with low overhead. Multipass has been under a GNU GPLv3 license but not all of it was open-source. There were some portions of the Windows and macOS code that were proprietary up to this point but now integrated into the open-source Multipass codebase.
With today’s Multipass 1.16 RC release they proclaim “the entire code base became fully open source! … Fully open source. Previously proprietary bits for Windows and macOS are now part of this repository.”
More details on the proprietary bits being opened up via the Multipass merge of One Repo To Rule Them All.
Multipass 1.16 has also been working on improvements to its GUI, fixes to the daemon/service, and security improvements. There is also better documentation.
More details on today’s Multipass 1.16 release candidate via GitHub.
