Citrix-XenSource deal raises open-source questions
New owner must stick to Xen’s open-source principles, analysts say
By Rafael Ruffolo, Toronto | Monday, 27 August, 2007
Citrix’s US$500 million (NZ$720 million) acquisition of XenSource, along with VMware’s massively successful IPO earlier this month, has further legitimatised the virtualisation space, but it may also be causing some disillusionment among the open-source community.
XenSource commercialises the open-source Xen virtualisation software, a free virtual machine monitor. It can be delivered as a virtualisation platform, as found in the XenEnterprise product, or embedded in a host operating system, such as Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise 10 or Red Hat’s RHEL 5/Fedora 7.
Gartner analyst George Weiss says XenSource chief executive Peter Levine has to make a concerted effort in order to retain the loyalty of the open-source Xen developers.
“The possible downside here is the open-source community might see that technology being co-opted by a larger conglomerate of proprietary companies that may use the open source as a vehicle toward the financial gains and monetary rewards of this Citrix-XenSource company,” Weiss says.
He says the move could even cause companies such as Red Hat and Novell to move towards alternative technologies, such as Qumranet’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), a Linux kernel infrastructure for supporting virtualisation.
“KVM now appears to be the only unaffiliated project for virtualisation that isn’t beholden to any commercial organisation,” Weiss says. “KVM is not dependant on anybody other than its own developers, and that’s the way XenSource would like Xen to appear. But if there’s any further gains by KVM, organisations will start to look to it as an alternative.”
Weiss says both Citrix and XenSource have to continue to invite community participation and rewards, thus maintaining the build-up for the Xen Hypervisor ecosystem, in order to avoid that scenario.
But according to Novell Canada CTO/CIO Ross Chevalier, the acquisition will not jeopardise the Xen project. He says the acquisition reaffirmed its commitment that virtualisation with Xen is an important tool for businesses and Novell will continue to have faith in the project.
“Our contribution from the word ‘go’ has been to the open-source Xen project and that will be our whole and complete focus,” Chevalier says. “XenSource is now going to go build some stuff that will become licensed products using the Xen architecture and that’s great for them. But our commitment is to the Xen project.”
Chevalier also says Novell’s Suse Linux 10 wasn’t created in a vacuum or by any single vendor.
“The work we do becomes part of the community release, and if we do a great implementation of those tool sets and we provide great support, then that’s our value proposition,” he says. “But if you go closed, well then you’ve just got yet another propriety implementation.”
As for KVM, Chevalier says Novell will continue to explore KVM as an option for its community release of open Suse.
“Because really that’s what contributing to the open-source community provides,” Chevalier says. “If at some point KVM provides the right level of solution and we’re comfortable with that being a part of the commercial release, then we’re going to support that too. Our whole goal is we don’t want to force customers into a box and limit freedom of choice.”
But Weiss points to last November’s Novell-Microsoft deal, in which the two agreed to collaborate on the development of some technologies, including trying to help Windows work with Novell’s open-source Suse.
“When this happened, there was a lot of disillusionment in the market and a lot of Suse developers left on the principle that they wouldn’t work for a company that has these agreements with proprietary vendors,” Weiss says.
Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, says he asked both XenSource and Citrix about the future of the open-source project. “They both stated to me that they are fully committed to maintain Xen as an open-source project,” Mann says. “And I actually believe that this gives them a lot more resources to do this.” Mann says the Xen project’s biggest contributors were companies like Intel, AMD and Novell, and that the continued contribution from these enterprises will keep it strong.