Is it time to fork Xen?
(Credit:
Zim Rent-a-car)
I read this Charlie Babcock (InformationWeek) interview with Peter Levine (CEO, XenSource) and Wes Wasson (corporate VP of worldwide marketing, Citrix), and I'm left with the feeling that XenSource really doesn't see Xen's future in open source, but rather in Windows.
Which makes me think it may be time to fork the project and move on. But then, the company already did that for us, didn't it?
As Michael Tiemann writes, one of the wonderful attributes of true open source is that it divorces you from the need to trust your vendor. If the vendor zigs (down an "evil" path), you can zag. Read these comments and tell me what you think should be done with Xen/XenSource:
INFORMATIONWEEK: Is the work being done with Microsoft separate from the open source work?
Levine: The reason for an engineering office in Redmond is our strategic relationship with Microsoft. It started over a year ago, before any talks with Citrix. It was crystal clear to me that the bulk of the virtualization market was going to be among Windows customers. Red Hat and Novell had already embedded Xen in Linux, and Linux was going to be a much smaller market.
Wasson: We want to preserve a great relationship with Microsoft [Matt note: Of course Citrix does, as most of its business is Windows-related], one that's pretty unique. What XenSource is doing with Microsoft in virtualization mirrors what Citrix did in Windows Terminal Services. We helped extend the Microsoft product. We got the right stuff [Citrix Presentation Server and proprietary ICA protocol] into their environment. For every dollar of Presentation Server we sell, Microsoft gets 75 cents.
We gave code to Microsoft that became part of the core of Windows Terminal Services and got source code rights to Windows Server. We work with Microsoft on things that are years in advance. Microsoft is tremendously willing to do that when you're not pretending that things that should go into the operating system [such as the virtualization hypervisor] are not available to them and will be supplied somewhere else. VMware is thinking of itself as an operating system vendor and Microsoft competitor. They want to compete with the Windows operating system.
In other words, XenSource's future with Citrix is Windows and helping Microsoft. Sounds like a fork-worthy situation to me.
Fortunately, XenSource has basically already done this, separating the Xen project (and governance thereof) from XenSource, the company (and the proprietary work it's doing). Thank you. That makes it easy.
What's sad is how little value XenSource seems to put on the Xen project, despite the fact that no one would care $.02 (much less $500 million) for XenSource but for the Xen project. Peter Levine feels the same, but for a different reason:
"While the engine [Xen project] is open source, the car is the value-add that customers need," said Levine, referring to XenSource's value-add virtualization services and management capabilities, which are not open source.
This would be more credible if customers were paying XenSource much for its "car." They weren't/aren't. The company has a big OEM deal coming that is expected to account for much of its 2008 revenues, but its current customers pay $2,000/each (roughly) for the car. It sounds to me like XenSource had a hard time building more than a Yugo around the engine.
But that's its fault, not Xen's.
Microsoft may be the future of XenSource (rumors are swirling that Citrix is an acquisition target, which makes sense given how much of its business is tied up in Redmond), but Microsoft is not the future of Xen. We can thank XenSource for recognizing its allegiance early and setting Xen free. Of course, the GPL already did that, which is probably why Microsoft has no great love for the project anymore.
Tant pis. Xen is a great project with a great future. I would have liked to have seen XenSource help steer that future, but it will be busy working on Microsoft's. Life goes on.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Somehow you have ended up being utterly confused about the value of open source, and the value of Xen. I'll expand on this in a longer blog on my own site, but suffice it to say this:
1. XenSource always makes the best version of the hypervisor available in open source - indeed it is a community work product. Citrix will dramatically increase our effort on the project with $, headcount and testing. Xen will benefit enormously.
2. The project delivers an engine and not a car *specifically* to enable different vendors to add value for different use cases around that engine, *and make money*; in addition, it allows the engine to serve a range of different use cases eg: Xen on PDA, Xen on client, Xen on server. A complete product (eg: Fedora Core) even if open sourced, would not be the right thing to do. Better to have the world's best engine for every CPU/platform.
3. XenSource's car serves a server virtualization market today. That market is, by virtue of the customer's choice, a primarily Windows market. Our job is to serve *the customer*, so we work very hard on getting Windows to fly on Xen. In my view, that's one of the best uses of open source ever. We never have a better version of the engine than the community.
4. Our car is actually like a fleet of Lexus GS 430s. Calling it a Yugo makes it clear that you don't understand the value proposition and certainly haven't tried it yourself.
5. We have an utterly free server virtualization product called XenExpress that serves both Windows and Linux virtualization needs with superb high performance and ease of use. It's another way that we give back to the community. You can download it at www.xensource.com/products/Pages/XenExpress.aspx. It is a direct competitor with ESX server, but it's free, and we have over 15,000 users in production with that product.
6. XenSource's product is not the only one in the Xen community that serves the Windows customer base. As far as I can tell, each one of Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and Virtual Iron all do the same thing. Last time I looked, the KVM crowd are all trying to do the same.
Any post that trots out the (hackneyed) "Microsoft is evil" phrase is rooted in religion, and fails to understand what customers want, and that open source businesses have a legitimate right to deliver value to the customer and make money.
Your religion is irrelevant to the customer who uses Microsoft's products, and in my view condescending to the open source community, who have a very reasonable expectation to use their open source skills to deliver value to customers and to make money doing so. Open source allows us to pool our efforts to out-innovate proprietary software, so we all get a leg up. It is not about religion.
The vendors in our community that serve the Windows customer base are all valued contributors to, and users of of open source software to serve their customers. I'm worried that you fail to understand this.
Simon Crosby, CTO, XenSource
I don't think you realize the situation, though I would agree with you that Xensource is on their way to becoming a pariah in the OSS with their attitude. Xen's overzealous subservience to MS does make them look bad, but Xen's Windows virtualization is not about MS. On the contrary, Xen's Windows virtualization is ALL about linux and nothing about Windows. In virtualization what counts is the host and not the guest. Currently, Xen with VT provides the best windows virtualization in the market, and for a customer looking to efficiently virtualize his windows servers, Xen is the best choice. And With Xen, automatically follows Linux. In other words, a solid Windows Virtualization can actually push Linux into Enterprises who would have never bothered about Linux otherwise.
In fact, it is ironical that Citrix which used to be a major Windows vendor, is now a Linux company, as in, their core infrastructure ultimately has to be run on Linux. I am not really sure MS is happy about this. This is absolutely not what MS would want. What MS would prefer is having Linux running ON TOP of windows, and not the other way round.
Also, XenSource touting their Windows capabilities need not have to do with Windows as such, but rather they are trying to call attention to Xen's multi-operating-system capacity, which is something that distinguishes it from other projects like openvz. But no points to the XenSource Management for creating all sorts of wrong impression with their idiotic statements and their obsequious nod to MS every time they make a public statement.
An example to make it clearer: Parallels on Mac that efficiently virtualizes Windows actually helps Mac, and not Windows, and that's one of the reasons why Apple doesn't allow its OS to be the guest.
Ligesh http://lxlabs.com
- Sleeping with MS
- by ligesh August 26, 2007 12:32 AM PDT
- Hi Simon,
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(3 Comments)I don't think MS is evil, though it is historical fact that they had engaged in quite unethical activities--like Windows 3.1 displaying random error message when run over DR DOS--, and also no one who has partnered or competed with them has survived.
MS friendly attitude towards XenSource is purely owing to their utter desperation, and that's because their own Viridian is years away, and even with the extremely delayed release, is going to lack key features.
Once they have Viridian solidly out, i don't think you will be welcome at Redmond in any manner. So my advice is: Make the best of it now.
But anyway what. rankles the community is not that MS is evil, but rather how you cannot stop gushing out effusively how much close you are with MS in almost every one of your public statements.