Slashdot Mirror
Crowdfunding Campaign Seeks a Fully Open Source Alternative to Citrix XenServer (kickstarter.com)
"Free/libre and 100% community backed version of XenServer," promises a new Kickstarter page, adding that "Our first prototype (and proof of concept) is already functional."
Currently, XenServer is a turnkey virtualization platform, distributed as a distribution (based on CentOS). It comes with a feature rich toolstack, called XAPI. The vast majority of XenServer code is Open Source.
But since XenServer 7.3, Citrix removed a lot of features from it. The goal of XCP-ng is to make a fully community backed version of XenServer, without any feature restrictions. We also aim to create a real ecosystem, not depending on one company only. Simple equation: the more we are, the healthier is the environment.
The campaign reached its fundraising goal within a few hours, reports long-time Slashdot reader NoOnesMessiah, and within three days they'd already raised four times the needed amount and began unlocking their stretch goals.
But since XenServer 7.3, Citrix removed a lot of features from it. The goal of XCP-ng is to make a fully community backed version of XenServer, without any feature restrictions. We also aim to create a real ecosystem, not depending on one company only. Simple equation: the more we are, the healthier is the environment.
The campaign reached its fundraising goal within a few hours, reports long-time Slashdot reader NoOnesMessiah, and within three days they'd already raised four times the needed amount and began unlocking their stretch goals.
This is a good idea. I donated. If you don't have Open Source, you have no idea what your systems are doing. If the Intel debacle has taught us anything, it has taught us closed hardware is bad too.
Bravo!
Pardon my ignorance on the topic but what can this offer that Linux's KVM cannot?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
A clear and easy path to migrate off Citrix ZenServer, once enough of the current features are duplicated. Making the whole thing 800-171 compliant would also open up a huge niche market.
Really no one could come up with a better name than "XCP-ng"?
Remember that when you're next in a hospital and need heart surgery. I don't know about you but I'd rather have someone specialized to the task.
Software development requires a specific skill set, time, and energy that not everyone has. Despite all that bullshit Bill Gates et al are spewing about everyone learning to code, not everyone can code. Even if they had the talent, they may not have the time to learn it on top of whatever else they're doing.
Your argument is breathtakingly ignorant, and a perfect example of the self-important attitude that keeps Linux and most other OSS projects from going mainstream.
To continue your analogy... Would you rather have a heart surgeon who learned his craft from a secret society using methods which have not been openly peer reviewed OR would you like a heart surgeon who studies all of the open literature on heart surgery and learns the best practices from his/her peers.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
That's actually not the comparison I was making. I was trying to point out not everyone who uses software, has the time AND the energy AND the skill to also maintain software. A heart surgeon, for example, cares about medicine. They care about saving lives. It is a demanding job that already requires a lot of time and energy and skill to master, and that doesn't leave much room for software development.
But according to the GP, because they don't ALSO know how to do software development, said heart surgeon can go fuck themselves. And that's just idiotic.
To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.
Excuse me, but "para-virtualization" is an optional feature and an effective performance enhancement for virtualization: Every virtualization technology supports hardware virtualization.
"Whatever else they're doing" is why more open code source is needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
But even with open source, the average user (who is not a programmer) still has no idea what their systems are doing.
I think this is accurate to a large extent, but I'd similarly argue that licensing is less relevant to such users as well; free-as-in-beer matters more to such users than free-as-in-freedom. It's possible that Xenserver 7.2 will continue to live for quite some time; bare metal hypervisors generally need updating less often than guest OSes (well, except Hyper-V). Xenserver is, for the most part, in competition with Proxmox, the free version of ESXi, the free version of Hyper-V Server, and of late, Docker in many instances.
Now, admittedly these hypervisors are not at exact feature parity, but the reality of the situation is that most folks who are rolling out hypervisors to run VMs aren't also pouring through hundreds of megabytes of source code, meaning that at the end of the day, they have to trust someone. Whether it's a group of internet volunteers, or Citrix, or VMWare, or Microsoft, either one trusts, or one doesn't. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but the fact that source code is available isn't itself a dealbreaker for the overwhelming majority of users.
To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.
Your "different camps" are just like proprietary software developed by different companies who don't share trade secrets.
Open source heart surgery publishes results for everyone to learn from.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Because everyone always hires the best for a specific task. Ever hear of Therac-25 maybe you should look it up.
Closed source/open source it does not matter.
For the open source advocates: Tell me when was the last time you actually looked over every line of code in an open source system? For how long did you monitor all updates after? How many systems were included? Who is responsible for all of that? How do you know you can trust them? If someone paid to have the software analysed and a bug that they could exploit for their own benefit is found, what incentive do they have to tell anyone else about it? (Caugh... NSA caugh...)
For the closed source advocates:
Just a few things to keep in mind. Ever wonder how many features are in the products you buy? How many undocumented features? How many non-requested or undesired features? What do you do if the firm supporting your software goes under or sells your contract to someone who does not care about it? Ever hear about white-box testing, guess what closed source means you need to rely on someone else to get that right.
Open source is not inharently better than closed source. Sure it grants you a few options, but unless your on the verge of being insane you have little incentive to take advantage of those. Which means you need to pay someone else to do all that. When was the last time you donated to linux, mozilla, or any other open source project? So why is it so much better than closed source?
"Build a UI that controls all the VM's with some kind of web front end.
One of the tricks is going to viewing remote systems. There is a remote desktop variant that encodes displays as h264 or similar. That should be viewable in a web page. Better yet, if you can somehow tie into existing paravirtual drivers in common distributions, though there are some details there to work out."
You mean like oVirt (www.ovirt.org), which has all of these (or equivalent features) and more, including live migration, HA support for running the manager as a "managed" VM, support/integration for running Glusterfs on the "nodes" to be used for storing VM disk images (aka hyper-converged) etc.
"The campaign reached its fundraising goal within a few hours, reports long-time Slashdot reader NoOnesMessiah, and within three days they'd already raised four times the needed amount and began unlocking their stretch goals."
Sorry I don't follow a lot of kickstarter campaigns, but of the ones I have heard about it seems like the ones that over raise are more likely to fail. I think it is a matter of their eyes are bigger than their ability to execute. I will be interested to see if this one can keep their expectations in check and not let feature creep kill the project.
Nothing is perfect, open is still a few steps ahead of closed because the opportunities are available to you even if you choose not to take them, and everyone has an equal level of access to the code.
Every problem that *can* happen to open source, can and does happen to closed source code as well, but closed source has an additional set of problems too.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Except in Open Source we'd have 5 different camps not doing heart surgery but squabbling over which scalpels to use and designing new scalpels that don't work in standard autoclaves because of their 3d printed ergonomic handles and the actual practice of the surgery would be the exact same as it is now.