The choice to use VMWare was nothing personal to VirtualBox; we just happen to already be running VMWare on our dev boxes. (I'm actually downloading VirtualBox now to see if cross-compatibility is possible.)
That goes to prove that closed source is really a dead end, once you have a sufficient head-start you can even afford to give away a turn-key copy of your software and still sleep at night.
Impressive!
Stallman is incapable of understanding this, perhaps because he simply has never used any such services. Users want to have and control access to their data. That's it. The AGPL's only effect is to underscore how inadequate it is at doing anything for end-users -- by taking Freedom Zero away from operators, it leaves the exploitation of data and network effects as their only means to non-menial profit.
No one forces website operators to use AGPL code. It's a trade they make in order to cut development time in exchange for meeting the openness conditions. It's up to them to decide if that is economically worthwhile.
Banning people from deciding that trade is worthwhile would be fairly counterproductive. And having the courts invalidate the license because you have a philosophical problem with it seems to be slightly unfair on the people who wrote the code and chose to give it away for free (with some conditions attached). You might as well say it's OK to steal library books because, hey, you don't believe in the contract that says you have to return the books is fair.
We really hope this will help us more than hurt us in the end. Part of the problem with releasing something like reddit as open source is that it isn't designed around installation. For the most part, the pieces have been built in place organically as needed. This means that even though the source is out there, it's been really hard to get developer contributions as many get stuck before they get reddit up and running locally.
This should effectively lower the barrier to entry there and let devs actually think about the code and adding features rather than about whether or not rabbit-mq or cassandra are properly configured.
You build stuff because you have to when it hits, especially if you experience 'unexpected growth', and things like installation documentation and so on will suffer, if they exist at all.
So releasing a working VM is a great way to do this, it's about as user-friendly as you can get.
I think you'll be setting an example here that will be followed many times.
I actually planned on creating a Vagrant box (vagrantup.com) for reddit development to ease the development for Reddit. I was waiting until after I got another release of Vagrant out to do it (for no other reason than personal time management), but I'm motivated by this to do this sooner.
I'll take a look tonight and see if I can do this sooner rather than later, which will bring this to VirtualBox.
disclaimer: I am the developer behind Vagrant.
Perhaps Smalltalk-like images will make a comeback?