my web 0.2 website

I’m somewhat worried about the future of Xen.  I’ve spent the last few years being worried about the future of Xen, because it’s been a project that’s been relatively encumbered by politics.  So much so that (and in fairness, partly because) the Linux kernel developers have been keen to work on their own virtualisation projects.

I installed some new Xen hosts for a customer last week, and used it as an opportunity to catch up with Xen news.  Although I used to use the xensource open source version to build xen hosts, I saw the free ‘xen-on-a-cd’ downloadable ISO as an extremely important project that dropped the barrier for Xen adoption.

This free CD image is now limited to only four guest OSes - need more on this platform ?  Or need to use more than 4GB of ram ?  These features now cost.

I acknowledge that open source free, does not mean costless.  But there have been two business models that are prevalent in the open source world, and Citrix are starting to behave like less like my favourite one.

The good model is like Red Hat’s - lending developers, money, and a strong name into a popular open source project which is largely feature compatible with a commercial version.  The company is backed by licensing the commercial version, and paid for support/training.  I say lending, because the return to the company should be quality feedback, software, and advocation in the community.
The other is more like MySQL’s.  Although the code is published and shared between the community, the company work hard to limit the distribution of simple-to-install binary versions to enterprises who will not pay for it, for example - by their own admission - they withhold features, and essential bug fixes from the community version for an unspecified time.

Limiting features, and specifying the free edition must run on lower grade hardware, might herald a sad death to any project’s status as a free project.  If, like with MySQL, the community editions and enterprise editions embark upon a long drawn out divorce, then pay for the software, or bin it at the beginning of the process.  I don’t know what will happen to the majority of Xen installations if some people need to make the choice .. but look out for some KVM articles in the coming days.