Open Source and the "Xen" of Xen

willdavid writes "In a follow-up to his original look at what happened to Xen, Jeff Gould talks to XenSource CTO Simon Crosby. Usually we hear about how open source provides freedoms for end users. However, this article talks about the difficulty a small software developer has with an open source license, in particular, the need to prevent Red Hat, IBM or Novell from running away with all the business revenue."

Comments

As opposed to closed commercial software...

[timeOday]

...where fending off Microsoft and IBM is a piece of cake.

Hybrid strategies

[seanadams.com]

Combining OSS + proprietary software can get complicated, but it's entirely possible to make a viable business that way and still have a positive, reciprocal relationship with the OSS community. You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D. I.e. it should be be managed by you and hopefully mostly developed on your dime. If it is useful for your customers to be able to tweak the source, or if the software is useful by itself, then developers will work on it. However, if you're only playing lip-service to OSS, and people are really just going to run into a bunch of obstacles where they can't really edit the software because it's tied in to too many proprietary pieces, then you need to rethink your strategy.

Can't have it both ways

[bhmit1]

I think what we are seeing is the never ending desire to have the benefits of an open source model while still having the closed source control. Finding the right balance so that people use your product while still having a reason to pay for the upgraded version or support isn't easy. And what we seem to be seeing these days is that open source isn't leveling the playing field, but rather tilting the game towards the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers. There's a value with knowing how to run a business that the big players are providing and the smaller developers will need to learn if they want to compete.

Free software, sold

[athloi]

Their reasoning is that if they released all of their stuff under GPL then Red Hat would just scoop it up and serve it in place of the very inferior management tools bundled into RHEL5.

This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view. The other is that FOSS software tends to clone/emulate existing commercial products.

Both of these face the same problem, which is that in a media-driven capitalist economy, ideas need to become products that are sold in order to be recognized as "part of" the economy and society as a whole. While GPLv3 is a good start toward working around this, another thought is that FOSS should operate on commercial principles from the beginning, and serve as a think tank and consultant shop that hires out its programmers to implement their own code for customers, eliminating the need for boring and unrelated "day jobs."

Xen didn't copy

[vlad_petric]

It was the first real paravirtualization approach. Check out Xen and the art of virtualization, it's a pretty good read.

Yes, I realize you're not saying that Xen copied, but that Open Source in general copies. Xen is a great counterexample.

Re:Sell Out?

[sarathmenon]

Why not just sell out to a company like Red Hat? That wouldn't make sense. If you are starting a company, will you sell it off in its infancy, just when you were starting to make some money and have an awesome product with very less competition? If the Xen guys knows hows to market themselves, they can be bigger than redhat is today. I wish them good luck, and looking at their strategy, I really can't find much fault with it, as long as the basic stuff remains GPL licensed.