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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 general manager of the Americas division and 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.
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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.