After Citrix bought Xen in 2007, the core of this popular open-source hypervisor remained open source, but some of the rest became proprietary software. Now Citrix has decided to take all of its virtual machine manager and cloud XenServer software back to its open-source roots.
Citrix has announced that all of its XenServer 6.2 platform will be open-source software. Citrix isn't making these open-source moves because Xen isn't popular. Far from it.
Xen is the foundation of both the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and Rackspace's OpenStack-based cloud. XenServer has customers.
So why commit everything, à la Red Hat, to open source?
For starters, Citrix already was moving in this direction. In April 2012, Citrix gave its CloudStack software to the Apache Software Foundation, and a year later Citrix put its core Xen project under the Linux Foundation's control.
This final move, Mark R. Hinkle, Citrix' senior director of the cloud computing community, explained in a blog, came about because, "Much of XenServer already was open source, leveraging packages from the Xen Project, Linux kernel and the XAPI Project. We believe that open source plays a strategic role in the future of virtualization and cloud technology and that only open source offers the opportunities for collaborative, open innovation and the economies of scale that these markets demand. By open sourcing XenServer, customers, partners and developers gain full public visibility into the ongoing development and future of XenServer and can directly engage with us to contribute new XenServer functionality, build deeper integrations and steer the architectural direction of the platform."
Read more: ZDNet
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