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Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
jrepin writes "The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. The Xen Project is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. As the project experiences contributions from an increasingly diverse group of companies, it is looking to The Linux Foundation to be a neutral forum for providing guidance and facilitating a collaborative network."
This isn't the Linux Foundation going looking for a virtualisation project and picking Xen.
From what I've read, this is the open source Xen community asking Citrix if the open source project can shift to being run by an independent foundation, Citrix agreeing to that, and the Xen community picking the Linux Foundation as the best fit.
I'm sure that if Redhat wanted to move KVM to the Linux Foundation, that would be able to happen too. It would be like eg the Apache Foundation managing 'competing' projects just fine.
The Xen community felt that this move will make it easier for other companies and developers to contribute to the open source Xen project, and hope that it will improve collaboration with other projects etc etc.
Citrix still has its commercial XenServer product, and will presumably still employ developers to work on the open source Xen. But the management of the open source project is now independent from Citrix.
Personally I think it's a good move - after all Xen is running an awful lot of hosting/cloud providers out there.