xen

Open-sourcing my error on XenSource

The unfortunate thing about writing all your thoughts down in a blog is that it makes it very clear just how wrong I can be sometimes. My "code" is online, for everyone to see, analyze, and critique.

And critique you do. :-)

A case in point is my fulminations earlier Thursday on XenSource and its alleged abandonment of the Xen project. John Vigeant, a friend from my Novell days and XenSource's director of Business Development, kindly swatted me in an e-mail for errors in my post.

Witness my sackcloth and ashes (with John's permission--he must have some perverse pleasure in seeing me don this hairshirt :-):… Read more

Is it time to fork Xen?

I read this Charlie Babcock (InformationWeek) interview with Peter Levine (CEO, XenSource) and Wes Wasson (corporate VP of worldwide marketing, Citrix), and I'm left with the feeling that XenSource really doesn't see Xen's future in open source, but rather in Windows.

Which makes me think it may be time to fork the project and move on. But then, the company already did that for us, didn't it?… Read more

If Citrix didn't buy into open source, it got $0 worth of value

Saying open source is incidental to Citrix's acquisition of XenSource is like saying one would buy Red Hat and not care much about its role in the Linux kernel. Yet Matthew Aslett and Raven Zachary both suggest precisely this.

I guess they're following the flawed reasoning that Savio Rodrigues uses. Namely, that if Citrix cared about Xen and not just XenSource's proprietary technology, it could just fork Xen for free. This would be true if it weren't false. Xen without open source is an emperor without clothes.

It's also the reason that Novell failed to entice XenSource into an acquisition when it was knocking on Peter Levine's door nine months ago. It tried the "fork" argument, and gave a low valuation as a result. Guess who acquired XenSource?… Read more

What the XenSource acquisition says about proprietary software

In response to my post on the XenSource acquisition, a friend made this comment, which I think is dead-on:

What this also says is that it isn't about the revenue. It is about having new technology in the arsenal to go after older competitors that have not revamped their technology. The lack of investment in technology by both start-ups and the established players in the early part of the decade is now catching up with them by making them exposed to new, open source entrants that were able to survive in the shadows of the dinosaurs. There is sales capacity and existing brand equity that can take these technologies and the new business model and make more out of it quickly.

As his email came in, I was on the phone with the CTO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise.… Read more

Citrix to buy XenSource for $500 million; open-source company valuations skyrocketing (UPDATED)

Wow. The ink was barely dry on my critique of Tim O'Reilly's position on whether proprietary companies will buy up the open-source companies, and along comes the news that Citrix is buying XenSource. It's a good technology fit, but Citrix would have been one of the last companies I would have accused of a predilection for open source.

Mea ignoranta.

The news is pretty intriguing, and funny on at least one count:… Read more

Citrix to buy virtualization company XenSource for $500 million

One day after the spectacular public offering of virtualization company VMware, Citrix Systems on Wednesday said that it intends to acquire open-source virtualization company XenSource for about $500 million.

Citrix makes so-called thin client software that delivers business applications from servers to desktop computers.

By acquiring XenSource, the company intends to move into the adjacent server and desktop virtualization market.

The acquisition will be financed through a combination of stock and cash and includes the assumption of $107 million in a vested stock options.

The company's open-source "hypervisor" software, called Xen, lets a single computer run multiple … Read more

Virtualization services market $11.7 billion by 2011

It may be virtualization, but we're talking real bucks.

Virtualization services are expected to turn into an $11.7 billion market by 2011, more than double its current level, according to a study released Wednesday by IDC.

Helping propel this market, which last year generated $5.5 billion, is a transition from using virtualization software solely in high-end and mainframe computers to making it available for lower-cost systems running x86 and x64 servers.

Virtualization software allows users to take a single server and load it up with multiple operating systems. And that, in turn, lets users string together low-cost … Read more

Virtualization's impact on open source business models

The Server Virtualization Blog has a useful piece on the impact virtualization can have on open source business models.

...But with virtualization as an integral component of the distro (whether Xen, KVM or one of the other open source virtualization technologies), Linux is only one (arguably the key) component of the stack, and when a different OSV?s product is virtualized on Linux (Windows, perhaps, or another open source OS), two new opportunities emerge: First, a Linux OSV can extend its value proposition to its customers by offering to Support other open source OSes virtualized; and second, by adding to their offerings the requisite closed source add-ons such as the Novell Windows Driver Pack for closed source OSes, the distros can artfully deliver high value mixed-source offerings that "price to value," and protect themselves from the kind of discounting attack that Oracle used on Red Hat.… Read more