Recently read about the famous "Sampling Case" that involved "George Clinton" . Yes the same George Clinton who ruled the 1970-1982 urban dance floors, mixing blues with earth-shaking bottom, cosmic consciousness, and some of the best guitar leads in dance music. He is also credited with giving birth to funk.
It is very interesting to see the parallels between music industry evolution and what virtualization driven digitization is doing to the computer industry.
Wikipedia describes Sampling "Act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph".
Sampling before the advent of CD's and digitization would have been a very laborious process. Imagine looping the tapes and making the cuts at the right spot. Digitization of music brought about these new usages that were not possible before and anybody could do that in their garage studio.
Also it opened a pandoras box for new issues for legal and copyright management. Again from wikipedia - " Early sampling artists simply used portions of other artists' recordings, without permission; once rap and other music incorporating samples began to make significant money the original artists began to take legal action, claiming copyright infringement. Some sampling artists fought back, claiming their samples were fair use".
Similarly digitization of desktops and server are starting to cause ripples through the existing models. Some of the rambling on new licensing around Virtual Hosted Desktops are already emerging. Early shots were fired by VMWare in an open letter and white paper, they wrote - "Microsoft is trying to restrict customers’ flexibility and freedom to choose virtualization software by limiting who can run their software and how they can run it ".
And Microsoft has responded, also changed some of the licensing terms . But the associated controversies around different class of licenses for OS's and more debate around it is just getting started. We can expect more fun in future when "Sampling" like cases are not far off as VM based virtualization technology becomes mainstream....
