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Open Source and the "Xen" of Xen 118

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the not-all-roses dept.
willdavid writes "In a follow-up to his original look at what happened to Xen, Jeff Gould talks to XenSource CTO Simon Crosby. Usually we hear about how open source provides freedoms for end users. However, this article talks about the difficulty a small software developer has with an open source license, in particular, the need to prevent Red Hat, IBM or Novell from running away with all the business revenue."
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Open Source and the "Xen" of Xen More

Open Source and the "Xen" of Xen

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  • Why not just sell out to a company like Red Hat?

    • Re:Sell Out? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sarathmenon ( 751376 ) <{moc.nonemhtaras} {ta} {mrs}> on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:40PM (#19879315) Homepage Journal

      Why not just sell out to a company like Red Hat?
      That wouldn't make sense. If you are starting a company, will you sell it off in its infancy, just when you were starting to make some money and have an awesome product with very less competition? If the Xen guys knows hows to market themselves, they can be bigger than redhat is today. I wish them good luck, and looking at their strategy, I really can't find much fault with it, as long as the basic stuff remains GPL licensed.

      • That wouldn't make sense. If you are starting a company, will you sell it off in its infancy, just when you were starting to make some money
        Hell yes! That is where most of the startup companies make their money. Have you never heard of IPO before? That's usually when people like Venture Capitalists cash out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kjs3 ( 601225 )
        Right...because it's not like Microsoft, Sun, EMC/VMware & IBM are big into virtualization. They've practically got the market to themselves...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you were redhat why would you buy? You can get the product for free. There's no sense in buying the company.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by suranyip ( 25422 )
        If you look at the examples of Sleepycat (makers of Berkeley DB, purchased last year by Oracle), MySQL and Trolltech (makers of Qt), it seems that most income for projects that are also available as open source is in dual licensing and support. You cannot dual license without owning the code. You may be able to provide support without owning the code, but it is much more efficient and credible if you have the authors in your team.

  • As opposed to closed commercial software... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:38PM (#19878483)
    ...where fending off Microsoft and IBM is a piece of cake.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh what? If I write a peice of software and release it under a closed licence then the only way Microsoft or IBM can beat me is by developing their own competing software. A company like Microsoft has an advantage of course in that if they make their software roughly as good as mine then they can probably beat me by tying it in with Windows and crush me with market dominance. But they still have to put the work into developing their own software in the first place.

      Contrast that with using most open source l

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by empaler ( 130732 )
        The proposed GNU business model is also built on support, not development.
        • That sounds awfully lot like stagnation.
        • Not proposed, required.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Raenex ( 947668 )
            Seems like most of the money in open source is not in support. Red Hat sells "enterprise" versions of their software that forbid you from freely installing and copying via trademark poisoning, but I guess the FSF ultimately puts up with it because Red Hat releases their sources. Then there's the Trolltech model of dual-licensing under GPL and a corporate friendly, proprietary license. Then there's the Mozilla model of getting $50 million from Google for being the default search engine. Then there's the

    • As opposed to closed commercial software...
      ...where fending off Microsoft and IBM is a piece of cake.

      Exactly what I was thinking. Specifically, they are trying to enter a market in which there is already a powerful, established player, with a successful product - VMWare. And other competitors are also in the wings (Microsoft, in particular, but not directly for virtualizing Linux-on-Linux, perhaps). By going open-source, they gain some benefits in competing with VMWare (which is not open-source), namely,

  • What did they expect once they got involved with Microsoft [theregister.co.uk]?

  • Hybrid strategies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) * on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:44PM (#19878557) Homepage
    Combining OSS + proprietary software can get complicated, but it's entirely possible to make a viable business that way and still have a positive, reciprocal relationship with the OSS community. You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D. I.e. it should be be managed by you and hopefully mostly developed on your dime. If it is useful for your customers to be able to tweak the source, or if the software is useful by itself, then developers will work on it. However, if you're only playing lip-service to OSS, and people are really just going to run into a bunch of obstacles where they can't really edit the software because it's tied in to too many proprietary pieces, then you need to rethink your strategy.

    • Bad hybrid strategy may be downfall of XenSource (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D.

      Yes indeed, and sadly that is a lesson that the XenSource people don't seem to have learned.

      They have virtually abandoned the Xen hypervisor code to focus on their closed enterprise offerings, as a result of which it's rapidly becoming obsoleted by KVM and OpenVZ and others. And once Xen no longer has the unique property of being the only fully working virtualization technology, XenSour

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 )

      You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D. I.e. it should be be managed by you and hopefully mostly developed on your dime. If it is useful for your customers to be able to tweak the source, or if the software is useful by itself, then developers will work on it.

      Software that is "useful by itself" is about the _worst_ thing for commercialising OSS, because it will subsequently be "leeched" by everyone else.

      Assuming by "OSS"

  • Can't have it both ways (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bhmit1 ( 2270 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:45PM (#19878565) Homepage
    I think what we are seeing is the never ending desire to have the benefits of an open source model while still having the closed source control. Finding the right balance so that people use your product while still having a reason to pay for the upgraded version or support isn't easy. And what we seem to be seeing these days is that open source isn't leveling the playing field, but rather tilting the game towards the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers. There's a value with knowing how to run a business that the big players are providing and the smaller developers will need to learn if they want to compete.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheModelEskimo ( 968202 )

      the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers

      Isn't that exact statement also true for the small players? In the mostly-proprietary days it was, "the big players can afford to leverage lots of applications because they can pay for the developers..." and now both sides have the benefit.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bhmit1 ( 2270 )

        the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers

        Isn't that exact statement also true for the small players? In the mostly-proprietary days it was, "the big players can afford to leverage lots of applications because they can pay for the developers..." and now both sides have the benefit.

        Both sides "can" benefit, but the old saying "nobody ever got fired for picking <insert big player here>" still applies. Sure, there are exceptions, especially when y

    • I think what we're seeing is that organizations are creating stuff at very little cost that benefit vast numbers of people in society, and they're trying to bring it to everyone they can, but they're tripping over the fact that our society equates "plentifully available" with "utterly worthless" and has no economic mechanism to funnel resources to support these types of endeavors.

      Which is a failing of the economic system. It shouldn't be so very hard for brilliant people to make our lives better, and it sh

  • Yet somehow MySQL survives (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And propsers. As does Mozilla.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by figleaf ( 672550 )
      MySQL AB survives by selling support, consulting and training for its product.
      Mozilla is primarliy funded by Google
      Redhat, Novell etc provide support, training for Xen as a part of their product.

  • Free software, sold (Score:5, Insightful)

    by athloi ( 1075845 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:49PM (#19878623) Homepage Journal

    Their reasoning is that if they released all of their stuff under GPL then Red Hat would just scoop it up and serve it in place of the very inferior management tools bundled into RHEL5.

    This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view. The other is that FOSS software tends to clone/emulate existing commercial products.

    Both of these face the same problem, which is that in a media-driven capitalist economy, ideas need to become products that are sold in order to be recognized as "part of" the economy and society as a whole. While GPLv3 is a good start toward working around this, another thought is that FOSS should operate on commercial principles from the beginning, and serve as a think tank and consultant shop that hires out its programmers to implement their own code for customers, eliminating the need for boring and unrelated "day jobs."

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view.

      What makes you think this a flaw and not a deliberate design decision ?
    • The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge.

      Why not? Isn't Red Hat getting people to use OSS who otherwise wouldn't? That seems to be an incremental effect which is not taking any opportunity away from the developer. I'm sure if the original developer wanted to be in the software support business he could easily do so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aminion ( 896851 )
      Excellent point. Mod parent up, mods!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      "The other is that FOSS software tends to clone/emulate existing commercial products."
      I don't see this as a real FOSS problem. Most commercial products are just clones or extensions of other existing products.
      You has more to do with the evolution of software then FOSS vs Closed Source.
      Take a look at Excel. If you knew Lotus 123 then Excel was easy to learn because it seemed to be a lot like good old Lotus. Oh and Lotus really was easy to learn if you knew Visicalc because it worked a lot like Visicalc.
      Lotus

      • As to the problems with making money off of FOSS. Well yes it isn't always easy and frankly I don't believe in FOSS as a universal solution for all software problems. It is great in some areas but I think is far from the universal solution that RMS and the faithful believe.

        This brings up an area where I prefer BSD type licenses over the GPL. I love photography and would like to program a compleat photo/graphics suite including editing, a db for inventory and photos, and a billing module along others.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Curien ( 267780 )
          Your impression of the effects of the licenses is misguided.

          Say you develop a photo-editing (or whatever) piece of software and release it under the GPL. Then you add a few new features and decide to start charging money for a closed-source version with more functionality. No problem! That is just fine.

          Now consider that Joe fixes a security hole in the GPL version of your software, and the same hole exists in your closed version. You can use his patch to fix the GPL version, but you cannot use it to fix the

          • Say you develop a photo-editing (or whatever) piece of software and release it under the GPL. Then you add a few new features and decide to start charging money for a closed-source version with more functionality. No problem! That is just fine.

            Ok, thanks I didn't know that. What if I were to take another GPL software like Inkscape [inkscape.org] and add a billing module, could I close source the module?

            You see the difference? If it's your code, the GPL doesn't keep you from doing anything you want. The only thing it

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Curien ( 267780 )
              What if I were to take another GPL software like Inkscape and add a billing module, could I close source the module?

              That's a complicated quetion and there's no general-purpose answer. The problem is the legal interpretation of "derivative work". If the module is "derived" (in a legal sense as applied to software) from the Inkscape source, then no. If your module really is independent, then yes.

              Take nVidia's closed-source Linux drivers, for example. They're basically a plug-in for the kernel. Some people thi

              • That's a complicated quetion and there's no general-purpose answer. The problem is the legal interpretation of "derivative work". If the module is "derived" (in a legal sense as applied to software) from the Inkscape source, then no. If your module really is independent, then yes.

                What I'd probably do is add some calls in Inkscape, or whatever else, that calls the billing module. I know those calls, being added to Inkscape, would have to be open. But I'm not sure about the billing module, which wouldn't

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
              If the billing module is a stand alone program then it is all good. If you added code to Inksscape which I would find an odd way of doing things then you would be bound by the GPL.

              What I would suggest if you really wanted to make money from this is to find a bunch of FOSS packages that do most of what you would want them to do. Add some bits of code to improve them and donate that back to the community. Then create a pretty package, installer, and a good mannual along with any closed source custom programs

              • If the billing module is a stand alone program then it is all good. If you added code to Inksscape which I would find an odd way of doing things then you would be bound by the GPL.

                In order to call, launch,or simply use the billing module from within Inkscape I'd add some calls into Inkscape. Say add a "billing" selection to the tools menu which when selected will start the billing module. I know if I were to distribute Inkscape with my calls added I'd have to include those calls in the source but as th

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
            "Now consider that Joe fixes a security hole in the GPL version of your software, and the same hole exists in your closed version. You can use his patch to fix the GPL version, but you cannot use it to fix the closed version."
            Well....
            1. Not if you follow the FSFs suggestion that every contributers transfers the ownership of the code to the original copyright holder. You would then own the code and could do with the the patch as you will. See CUPS as an example.
            2. Not if the patch is obvious. If it is a simp

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Curien ( 267780 )
              Not if you follow the FSFs suggestion that every contributers transfers the ownership of the code to the original copyright holder.

              That's an example of "asking for special permission." Also, the FSF doesn't suggest that contributers transfer ownership to the original copyright holder; they ask that everyone transfer ownership *to the FSF*.

              If it is a simple security hole then while you couldn't take the patch

              That's what I said. ... you could look at it and write your own version.

              You can, but that's legally d

      • I've always said that FOSS is great for commodity areas. Thinks like standard infrastructure (the OS, simple routing, standard Office applications, web browsers, IM, e-mail, to a lesser extent database, HTTP, FTP, SSH, e-mail, DNS, etc and other servers). Just about anything that is standard out of the box functionality people expect from a computer is great to have as an Open Source software. In a lot of ways, even Microsoft software is free as in beer for most folks. Other then Office Software, most

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by smoker2 ( 750216 )

        Most commercial products are just clones or extensions of other existing products.

        If you wanted to open a bakers shop, where would you do it ? In a street that had no bakers at all, or a few doors down from a successful baker ? There is usually a valid reason for the street with no bakers being that way, plus if the other guy can make it pay where he is, then you should be able to as well. Competition.

        It is great in some areas but I think is far from the universal solution that RMS and the faithful believe.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
          "I can either pay money for something I may use rarely or only once, *or* I can take a peek at the wealth of open source code out there, and write my own tailored version. I'm not trying to steal code, any more than a kid with a guitar is trying to steal music."
          You are correct but also rare.
          I hate to do use the dreaded car analogy but here it is.
          Time to change your oil
          You can pay someone to change it at the Jiffy Lube.
          or
          You can get the manual, get the tools, and learn how to do it yourself.

          I am all for Open

    • Xen didn't copy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:35PM (#19879245) Homepage
      It was the first real paravirtualization approach. Check out Xen and the art of virtualization, it's a pretty good read.

      Yes, I realize you're not saying that Xen copied, but that Open Source in general copies. Xen is a great counterexample.

      • It was the first real paravirtualization approach. Check out Xen and the art of virtualization, it's a pretty good read.

        Nope. IBM's pHype, Denali, arguably, L4, Exokernel, and even Nemesis were doing it long before Xen came around.
        • I didn't claim that Xen didn't take ideas from previous work (research doesn't happen in a vacuum, after all), just that Xen's paravirtualization isn't a ripoff of an existing system.

          Ok, I admit, I really don't know much about pHype, but I'm pretty sure that Xen is quite different from Denali. Denali's purpose is to run a myriad of small services, each in its own little sandbox. Xen runs full-scale OSes with conventional services. There are many other differences, it's a good idea check the paper. Perhaps

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      This paradox has always baffled me. The open source community creates it, and then another company sells it, with the hope of making revenue from specialized knowledge. It's one of the two biggest flaws of the current FOSS model, in my view.

      Funny, since it's exactly how it operates in the closed-source world too. Our company is making good money on implementing various huge software packages built by other companies. Of course then they have to pay for the software too, but that you can make money off havin

      • Hell, even then it's difficult, look at GIMP that *still* can't support more than 8bits/channel even though it's obviously wanted and useful.

        8-bits/channel was an early design assumption of the GIMP that all subsequent code hasn't questioned. It isn't a matter of changing a few pointers and routines here and there. "8-bits" is all over the primary codebase and the most popular scripts and plugins as well. GIMP will have to be refactored from the ground up to remove that limitation. The GEGL librarie

      • I just made a quick check and found a download site with 1000 image editors. How many open source applications do you need? There's GIMP and Krita and... honestly, I can't think of a third one.

        I've got a few more bookmarked. As for why there are so many, some are meant to do specific things, run in specific environments, or to edit specific formats. Some, like POV-Ray, are vector graphics editors. Some are bitmap editors. Some are 2D and others 3D. So

    • Where's the paradox in selling knowledge? I sell my knowledge to my employer(s). Companies have come to expect that if they have a problem, they'll be able to go to the vendor for support, and the only way to guarantee that is to sell it. In FOSS, I provide my code and I get a good program in return and the community as a whole provides me with more programs and everyone benefits and gets as much or more than they put into their projects. On the flip side there are companies that demand something the FOSS c

  • redhat stealing xen mindshare (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SolusSD ( 680489 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:54PM (#19878697) Homepage
    Redhat Enterprise Linux refers to xen as Redhat Virtualization. Sure- the actual binaries are referred to as Xen, but the documentation gives virtually NO credit where credit is due. If I were a Xen developer, i'd be insulted.
    • Well, knowing RedHat, they're probably shipping something so patched that it barely resembles the original software.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by DavidTC ( 10147 )

      Um, dumbass, read the article. Xen is trademarked and there are strict terms to using the trademark, which Redhat doesn't want to follow.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SolusSD ( 680489 )
        dumbass? its immature little pieces of.. . that make me hesitant to post anything on slashdot. If you read what i wrote i spoke of credit where credit was due. Redhat is legitimetly trying to make their Xen implementation look like their own.

        • Re:redhat stealing xen mindshare (Score:4, Interesting)

          by chicagoan ( 670650 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:39PM (#19879309)
          I disagree. I think RedHat is generalizing virtualization and that is obvious with their libvirt. On Fedora 7 libvirt supports both Xen and KVM. The idea is that as new virtualization technologies come in, you can use the same api / gui for dealing with the different virtual machines.

          If they had a GUI called RedHat Xen, then they'd need another one for dealing with KVM.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by batkiwi ( 137781 )
          Perhaps if you'd read the article you'd see that this EXACT issue is mentioned and it's something Xen has done on purpose.

          Anyone who does not follow the Xen ABI and guarantee to stay compatible cannot use the Xen trademark. Redhat will not agree to that, and thus cannot use the trademark. Xen is happy with this.
    • Welcome to Open Source... more specifically the GPL. I can take Linux, a plethora of free GNU tools, and call it Ubuntu.

      • Welcome to Open Source... more specifically the GPL. I can take Debian, a few pictures of naked people and call it Ubuntu.
        There, fixed it for you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )
      Redhat was forced to do this. Xen would not let them use their trademark. So it's Xen's own fault that they aren't being credited.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pembo13 ( 770295 )
      I guess you couldn't read the article, huh.

    • Red Hat do this because Xen trademarked the term and restrict its usage.

      The comment about libvirt is funny though. I would invite anyone to come and look at libvirt [libvirt.org] and particularly the mailing list archives [redhat.com] and to decide for themselves if libvirt is really "proprietary software published openly" (whatever that even means).

      Rich.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dedazo ( 737510 )
      This is exactly the same issue as "Iceweasel" in Debian, which was created due to a problem with the Mozilla Corp. branding, which is essentially proprietary. The problem here is not the license, but the trademark. Two very different things.

      For that matter, RH has also "vigorously" defended their trademarks. Just ask the CentOS people.

    • Red Hat will probably switch to KVM soon, using Xen only for backward compatibility. By calling it "Redhat Virtualization" they can partly conceal the strategy change.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by init100 ( 915886 )

        I don't think so, since KVM requires a VT-capable processor. Not every system has such a processor yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by init100 ( 915886 )

      So if Red Hat fucked up Xen (not saying they did though, it's just an example), would you want credit for the fuckup? That's what could happen if derivatives are allowed to use the original name.

      A name or a brand is often used as a stamp of approval. To say that your OS is a Unix system requires that you get a stamp of approval from The Open Group. To say that your virtualization software is Xen you need a stamp of approval from XenSource. And for the same reason, CentOS cannot be called Red Hat Enterpris

  • Lack of Creativity (Score:3, Informative)

    by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @01:59PM (#19878757) Homepage
    Starting a project as GPL is probably best because you'll get an idea how useful your application can be. It definitely makes it really hard to make money until you can run a Free red-headed step-child project and make people pay for the commercial version that's the belle of the ball. Another way to do it is to limit the GPL-ness of the project. Maybe by dual-licensing the code?

    It's still not easy though. Getting customers to open their wallets when there are much bigger companies like RedHat and Microsoft is tough anyway. That's why sales people are so valuable.

    I want to believe frustrations got the better of the person in question at that moment.

  • Plenty of licenses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FranTaylor ( 164577 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:15PM (#19878941)
    There are plenty of licenses out there. Don't like GPL? Fine, don't play in their sandbox. BSD has a nice place to play, too, and you can keep your toys if you want. You might get a little lonely, though.
    • A little rough around the edges.

      Lots of developers enjoy the creation of software and appreciate reuse and freedom of software (i.e. improving computer experience)-- why not turn a hobby into work?

      But, this view has proven difficult to combine with the current market as it renders development labour nearly priceless.

      I can imagine the frustration of others earning the revenue of your labour; the GPL is also about fairness (remember emacs/lucent).

  • Seems Xen + based system (Gnu/linux) is GPL, the Xen API is under a BSD-like license so closed source companies can use it. Then they have a management package that's closed.

    Their reasoning, which makes sense to me, is that they are afraid their hard work will be lost if Redhat or other commercial vendors can just include it in their distro and make sales based on it. Makes sense to me.

    • Yeah, sure, I suppose that is a legitimate fear...although Red Hat is actively working on their own management tools at the moment, and it will probably be a mute point in a year or so. Now that I think about it, though, I don't think I have ever known Red Hat to take another distribution's management or config utility and incorporate it into their own. Usually it is the other way around. Red Hat uses the Gnome System Tools package, but their printing and all of their server config tools are their own. Suse

  • ABI is interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jshriverWVU ( 810740 )
    Crosby argues that the ABI policy guarantees you can take a VM out of the freezer ten years from now and still be sure it will run on whatever version of Xen is current then.

    Wonder how this is done? This sounds like it would hinder the efficiency Xen. Besides who know's what architectures will be around in 10 years. I'm guessing it's not going to be a hypervisor anymore like VMWare, but more like VirtualPC which emulations the targeted architecture (perhaps both).

    Without this I seriously doubt I'll

    • Probably the same way you can still run DirectX 3 games on DirectX 9. The COM ideology is once you create an interface, if you need to add or change functionality, you create a new interface, rather than changing the old... and interface is seperate from implementation. I don't see why this can't be a general good rule of programming.
    • It just means that you'll have to emulate your virtualized emulated environment.

      Or something.
    • Its either not entirely true or slightly disengenuous. I'm not sure which.

      On the one hand, a Xen VM is basically a root filesystem and a kernel. Its not like VMWare where you have a proprietary disk image format and a proprietary VM config format etc.

      So from that perspective it should be trivial to pull a Xen VM out of the freezer in 10 years time and have it 'just work'.

      But this isn't the whole picture.

      There are two ways that the VM could work today:

      It could use HVM (hardware virtualisation) in which case

  • Open Graphics Project has this concern (Score:4, Informative)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:37PM (#19879271)
    I haven't read the FA yet, but this isn't the first time this concern has been raised. The OGP, from the beginning, have been struggling with the issue of some other hardware vendor legally taking OGP graphics chip designs and making their own version, thereby crusing the OGP out of existence.
    • Yeah right. Commercial GPU vendors have thousands of hardware designers and architects, and the resources to fill these positions with top people that have years of experience. Not only that, but the big players have a 10+ year headstart in designing GPUs, in an industry that heavily relies on experience and trade secrets rather than published textbook solutions.

      OGP is an admirable effort, but it will be years before they get anywhere close to developing seriously competitive hardware. And that is if they m

  • Interesting tidbit... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...for those who have/use VMWare ESX Server, you prolly already know it, but for those who do not, you may be surprised to know that VMWare uses Linux at the very heart of it's flagship product.

    Either way Linux wins.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kma ( 2898 )
      ...for those who have/use VMWare ESX Server, you prolly already know it, but for those who do not, you may be surprised to know that VMWare uses Linux at the very heart of it's flagship product.

      Common misconception, that. ESX runs on the vmkernel, a proprietary kernel that has no purpose in life other than running VMs. The RHEL 4 image is essentially a "privileged guest" that provides a user interface to the vmkernel, and a platform for tools and user-written utilities.

      Have fun,
      Keith (engineer at VMware)

  • Xen and Trusted Computing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:46PM (#19879401)
    Most people are unaware of the work going on as part of Xen for support of Trusted Computing. The Security Enhancements for Xen [xensource.com] project is working on integrating the TPM into Xen so that virtual machines will get "measured" (hashed into the TPM) and Xen can report which VM is running using Remote Attestation. This way if someone hacks their VM, remote parties will know about it. Other technologies related to this include Intel's Trusted Execution Technology [wikipedia.org] (aka LaGrande Technology) which adds security beyond the TPM to really lock down the machine. See this mailing list thread [xensource.com] for discussion of the recent patch adding TXT support to Xen.

    Personally I think this is fine and can really increase the security and utility of virtualization. But particularly with the recent release of GPLv3 and controversy over trusted computing it is interesting to see Xen moving in this direction. I imagine that it means that Xen will stick to GPLv2.
  • Source is the engine for Half-Life 2, while Xen was only in the original Half-Life. The name should be "XenGoldSrc."

    What?

    Rob

  • My take on Xen, VMWare, etc (Score:5, Informative)

    by QuasiEvil ( 74356 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @05:13PM (#19881029)
    Funny this should come up today - I just spent the weekend playing with Xen, trying to combine a couple of my household servers to get better utilization and to save power.

    I've been playing around with VMWare since it initially came out, including a production install of v4.5 at work to virtualize NT4 machines so that our LAN goons won't complain, and I've always found it extraordinarily easy to use. From a "get it running" perspective, the damn thing's idiot-proof. Fire it up, boot off some install media (even if it's Knoppix, and you're going to image the system from elsewhere), and you're golden.

    Xen? Eh, not so easy if you're not starting with a clean install of a Xen-aware OS. Lots of hours screwing with configurations, swapping kernels, messing with pygrub, and scratching my head as to why it wasn't doing anything, or was crashing with some cryptic error. Some of this is a result of the paravirtualization approach, as it requires some guest changes, but nobody's really published a good, generalized guide to native->domU migration. (Yes, I know about the CentOS one, and while it was some help, it was also wrong at some points, as it's never been updated for a CentOS 4.5 domU.)

    My take is this - the (non-Xen) tools bundled with RHEL5 (well, CentOS 5, really) are, um, overly simplistic at best and completely unhelpful at worst. Graphical tools be damned - by the end it was me, the text editor, and xm on the command line.

    I did get it up and running, and when given its own disks, the performance is impressive. It (unscientifically) *feels* faster than a Linux VM on Linux-hosted VMWare (desktop version). Now my web/mail server and house/firewall server have been combined. Tonight, I'll collapse in one more server. I'm quite confident I can do it in a reasonable amount of time, now that I've figured out most of the gotchas. Plus, sounds like a good thing to document and post so that others might not have to fight through quite as much as I did.

    In an enterprise environment, the management tools make or break you. When I'm managing a handful of machines, doing it myself is annoying but acceptable. When I'm virtualizing a datacenter and need tools to convert machines, manage their resources, manage their operations, etc., then management toys become the make-or-break part of the deal. We all assume your virtualizer works - now let's see what makes our lives easier managing this strange new world.
    • I keep a base install of a vm image as an lvm partition. If I want another server I create a new LVM partition, use dd to duplicate my base image then change the disk line in the vm config file. Ten minutes and another empty server has been deployed.

      Boot in and update the rpm's and you're good to go.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bit01 ( 644603 )

      When I'm virtualizing a datacenter and need tools to convert machines, manage their resources, manage their operations, etc., then management toys become the make-or-break part of the deal.

      Depends on what you mean by a management tool. A pretty GUI is not a management tool. Ability to automatically script/update/check a thousand servers in parallel is a management tool.

      It's the first box that's a problem. Every box after that is a copy. And copying is easy if you've planned it right, GUI or no.

      ---

      • I would agree that a pretty GUI is not the end-all, be-all of management tools.

        However, the assumption of both responses is that all virtualization is of new, mirror-copy machines. While there are definitely cases that's true, it's not in my world. I have a large amount of legacy machines where the software is fine, but the hardware is reaching end of life (and I don't mean end of support - I mean an abnormal rise in the number of failures indicating that the hardware itself is nearing an end). I need to

  • ...the need to prevent Red Hat, IBM or Novell from running away with all the business revenue.

    I think the idea of marketing and working with OSS is that level playing field and participation with the community.

    Competition under those rules implies that there's some out there for everyone. For too long we've all been operating under this ridiculous notion that success is measured by "growth." What if people were measured that way too? We'd all be failures somewhere between 16 and 22 years old!

    RedHat isn't out there trying to "dominate" the market. Novell isn't out there "crushing" the competiti

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by McGiraf ( 196030 )
      "You don't see RedHat complaining that other Linux distros are also using RPM do you?"

      No, but Debian users do when they have to deal with such a distro. ;)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Hucko ( 998827 )
        Amen to that! I can't see ever returning to an RPM based system, despite really enjoying Mandriva and Suse. Apt is brilliant. As nice as RPM package managers can be at times, apt has been simple and straight forward experience.
    • This is absolutely spot-on, kudos and mod points be unto you.

      Whether a person likes Red Hat or not (I gave up on them when Red Hat 8 came out; couldn't stomach Bluecurve, switched to Debian, and never looked back), RH has GPLed everything they've written. GPLed it, out there where anyone else who wants to can take it and try to turn a buck off it.

      The first Linux distro I ever used was called the "Turbo Linux Edition of Red Hat 4.2." That's what it said right on the CD. In the installer, the references were
  • I'm using KVM (yes I gather it is mostly Qemu) rather than Xen or VMware. Is there a compelling reason to use Xen over KVM?

  • XEN not suitable for end-users (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Maljin Jolt ( 746064 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:12PM (#19882625) Journal
    I tried all of XEN, VMWare, KVM and VirtualBox on AMD X2 5000+ Linux, eh... GNU/Linux host, with a dozens of different guests platforms running in it. And I found XEN the least suitable for desktop end users for technical reasons, with VirtualBox the best and friendliest at the same time. On servers maybe XEN could catch but it is still a technical nightmare.

    At the moment, not many users have good hardware for virtualisation but that will change in 2008 and I give XEN not so much chances to get major market slice.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ab384 ( 810021 )
      Companies like Slicehost [slicehost.com] use Xen to power their VPS servers. As a user, I have never had trouble with these servers (yet), and I suspect their user base runs at least into the hundreds, so maybe it isn't as difficult as you state.
  • I have servers running xen fine. but the situation with xen bothers me: documentation is bad, support on mailing list nearly dead, and xen always uses some old outdated linux kernel as base, so I never know if recent security updates made it into the xen kernel. So I wonder: is any of the alternatives ready to replace xen servers? kvm or lguest?
    I'm running linux below linux without hardware paravirtualisation support. or what about virtualbox - would be a much better vmware alternative.

    on the other side xen

  • Their reasoning is that if they released all of their stuff under GPL then Red Hat would just scoop it up and serve it in place of the very inferior management tools bundled into RHEL5.

    Yeah, we certainly wouldn't want users to have a better experience.

    Free software is about the users; proprietary software is about the programmers.

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