Oracle 'Losing Patience' with XenSource, VMware

HiTech writes "eWeek has an article looking at Oracle's frustration with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together. The goal is to develop a single interface for virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel. Oracle's comments follow those by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman at Oscon last week that XenSource and VMware were butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution. Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of products and alliances, admits the company had been approached by a neutral third party for offline mediation to establish how best to make this happen. But Simon Crosby, the CTO for XenSource, rules out any mediation, saying he believes the two companies are committed to solving the real technical issues."

Comments

Compromise

[neonprimetime]

Getting the two companies to talk to one another and work together has been requiring mediation by neutral parties

Seriously people, this is computer software we're talking about, not Israel and Hezbollah. I think they can come to a compromise pretty soon here.

Re:Compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Linux seems to be about new ideas and reinventing the wheel. Why are there so many file systems for example? There are valid reasons to have different interfaces. Perhaps different performance characteristics or access to system devices might be an issue. It takes serious planning and commitment not to change the api. The linux changelog suggests this is a big problem for some. The argument that its better doesn't always cut it.. why do you think windows is bloated?

Impatience is a Virtue

[Doc Ruby]

I wish someone would get Xen and VMWare to work together for a single virtualization interface. Then they might be able to talk some sense into Oracle so there's a single SQL interface regardless of which SQL vendor or server or version or driver or language or OS...

Long history of wheel reinvention

[Kadin2048]

Well, that's kind of to be expected: when you get right down to it, the whole premise of Linux was a reinvention of the wheel. It's a clone of an operating system that already existed -- it doesn't get much more re-inventive than that.

However, if there's anything we can learn from that, it's that sometimes there are benefits to re-inventing something that already exists, and in some cases may already seem to work okay. What seems like a complete waste of time to one person might create a result that's just different enough in some way to be really useful to somebody. (In the case of Linux, to a lot of us anyway, it was Unix but without the high cost and crappy licensing, and with the ability to see the source; hugely significant to some people but I'm sure it looked totally redundant to Unix people.)

Sometimes reinvention is necessary. You make a good point though, that there does seem to be a lot of it going on at any given time, and maybe that doesn't need to be the case here -- in any event, it seems like the reasons for taking parallel roads to the same place rather than working together should be carefully considered.