If the virtual machine image you prepared works on your machine and not on mine, I'll troubleshoot it and submit a bug to the VM project. It's pretty unlikely, though - that's why virtual machines and more recently operating system containers are so useful. They are portable. You can even emulate an x86 virtual machine in your browser in JavaScript and boot Linux within it: http://jslinux.org/ - cool, huh? With mature virtualization technology it's possible to take a snapshot of an operating environment + data + program as a portable image, then someone else can boot it into a virtual machine and run it. VMs are mature and run a large portion of the software powering the Internet. Containers are fairly portable as well. See more of my other comments on this topic if you're interested in my ideas about technology specifics and how it would be funded (I'm not saying I have a full plan, just avoiding repeating myself).