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

redhat stealing xen mindshare

[SolusSD]

Redhat Enterprise Linux refers to xen as Redhat Virtualization. Sure- the actual binaries are referred to as Xen, but the documentation gives virtually NO credit where credit is due. If I were a Xen developer, i'd be insulted.

Re:redhat stealing xen mindshare

[chicagoan]

I disagree. I think RedHat is generalizing virtualization and that is obvious with their libvirt. On Fedora 7 libvirt supports both Xen and KVM. The idea is that as new virtualization technologies come in, you can use the same api / gui for dealing with the different virtual machines.

If they had a GUI called RedHat Xen, then they'd need another one for dealing with KVM.

Re:redhat stealing xen mindshare

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Red Hat do this because Xen trademarked the term and restrict its usage.

The comment about libvirt is funny though. I would invite anyone to come and look at libvirt and particularly the mailing list archives and to decide for themselves if libvirt is really "proprietary software published openly" (whatever that even means).

Rich.

Plenty of licenses

[FranTaylor]

There are plenty of licenses out there. Don't like GPL? Fine, don't play in their sandbox. BSD has a nice place to play, too, and you can keep your toys if you want. You might get a little lonely, though.

Xen and Trusted Computing

[SiliconEntity]

Most people are unaware of the work going on as part of Xen for support of Trusted Computing. The Security Enhancements for Xen project is working on integrating the TPM into Xen so that virtual machines will get "measured" (hashed into the TPM) and Xen can report which VM is running using Remote Attestation. This way if someone hacks their VM, remote parties will know about it. Other technologies related to this include Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (aka LaGrande Technology) which adds security beyond the TPM to really lock down the machine. See this mailing list thread for discussion of the recent patch adding TXT support to Xen.

Personally I think this is fine and can really increase the security and utility of virtualization. But particularly with the recent release of GPLv3 and controversy over trusted computing it is interesting to see Xen moving in this direction. I imagine that it means that Xen will stick to GPLv2.

Re:Can't have it both ways

[TheModelEskimo]

the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers

Isn't that exact statement also true for the small players? In the mostly-proprietary days it was, "the big players can afford to leverage lots of applications because they can pay for the developers..." and now both sides have the benefit.

XEN not suitable for end-users

[Maljin Jolt]

I tried all of XEN, VMWare, KVM and VirtualBox on AMD X2 5000+ Linux, eh... GNU/Linux host, with a dozens of different guests platforms running in it. And I found XEN the least suitable for desktop end users for technical reasons, with VirtualBox the best and friendliest at the same time. On servers maybe XEN could catch but it is still a technical nightmare.

At the moment, not many users have good hardware for virtualisation but that will change in 2008 and I give XEN not so much chances to get major market slice.