I want to say that I think this is a really good move by Citrix.
There's a lot to be gained by opening the doors to community
participation. For some reason, we've stuck with Xen over KVM over the
years, and I think there's been some sense that the Xen community was
the right choice. This confirms that decision.
--Asai
On 6/25/13 7:41 AM, Mike McClurg wrote:
Hi xen-api,
Today Citrix has made a few big announcements. One is that there is a
new version of XenServer available, version 6.2. Another is that this
version of XenServer is available for use completely free -- all the
features of XenServer that used to be available only in the Platinum
edition (or in XCP) are now available without applying a product
license, and without paying Citrix money. And the biggest announcement
that Citrix made is that we are now committed to making XenServer
fully open source.
You are probably aware of Citrix's "interesting" relationship with
open-source software, particularly with the peculiarities of the
relationship between XCP and XenServer. These issues stemmed from the
original way in which XenServer was open sourced. We open sourced most
of the XenServer code base with no intention of forming a development
community around it, but instead to create a new thing, called XCP,
which would function as the vehicle to showcase this newly open
sourced code. It would start out as a de-branded XenServer, but the
hopes were that it would truly become a broader, open source
virtualisation platform for cloud computing. That never really
happened, and XCP was left as a strange twin brother to XenServer, one
that Citrix as a business never really acknowledged the existence of.
We would like to change that. Citrix as a business is happy with how
CloudStack's Apache foundation move has gone, and would like to see a
similar thing happen with XenServer. XenServer Engineering is
committed to making XenServer a proper open source product, and is
working right now to figure out how to change our development model to
be more open source. We are putting BSD or GPL licenses on all but a
few of our source repositories, and we are in the process of setting
up public mirrors to those repositories, along with mailing lists to
accept code contributions.
We aren't planning on XenServer becoming a true open source project
overnight, but we are laying the foundations for this change to
happen. As a result of this move to open source, a number of changes
will be happening to XenServer and XCP:
- XenServer will be completely free to use. We will still charge for
support, but we are no longer restricting any features* in the free
edition. There will also no longer be a need to "activate" the free
edition. Essentially the XenServer you download from Citrix will
function the same as the XCP you downloaded from xen.org. (* The only
thing that can be done with a paid-for XenServer is apply hotfixes via
XenCenter. Hotfixes will still be applicable via the CLI.)
- Notable software that we are open sourcing is our windows PV
drivers, XenCenter, and HA. We will not be open sourcing the v6
license daemon (links to closed-source binary), our build system code
(we're moving away from our current build system, and we don't have
the resources to support external users) nor any of the closed source
third-party driver tools we ship with XenServer, for which we have no
control over.
- XenServer's installer will have an option to install only open
source components. This option will be enabled by default when
upgrading from XCP. The compoenents that won't be installed include
closed-source storage drivers, the v6d licensing daemon, and the HA
daemon. (Unfortunately, we don't own the copyright to the HA daemon
code, and weren't able to get approval from the owner to release the
code as GPL in time for the XenServer 6.2 release. We have since
received permission to release this code as GPLv2, and we will be
doing so shortly.)
- The latest version of XenServer will be able to upgrade from XCP
1.6. If someone upgrades from XCP 1.6 to XenServer 6.2, they will have
the pure-open source configuration. If you do not want this, then we
recommend you do a fresh install.
- We are fixing the components that make up XenServer so that they are
buildable and installable on third-party Linux distros. We started
this effort with project Kronos, and we're picking it up again in
response to CentOS's Xen initiative. We're committing to becoming a
proper upstream software producer from which other Linux distros can
package our software.
- We will no longer build a thing called XCP. Because XenServer is
free to use in both the gratis and libre sense, there is no longer a
need to produce a different build of XenServer that is debranded and
slightly hobbled. The complexity of producing XCP over the years has
been too high, and the benefits of doing so from an open source
perspective have disappeared in light of the changes that we're making
to both XenServer itself, and the XenServer development model. I
really want to emphasise here that XCP users will be getting a better
deal than they had before. No more delays to XCP releases, timely
hotfixes that can be easily installed, and a product that's even more
open than it was before.
- XCP users who upgrade or switch to using XenServer will have a
number of benefits. XenCenter will work much better with XenServer
than it ever did with XCP. Hotfixes will be applicable as soon as they
are created, without the need to convert them to be applicable on XCP.
HA will be available. And no more waiting for months for a new version
of XCP to be built after a XenServer release.
I'm really excited about these changes to XenServer. I want to really
emphasise that the XCP community will be getting so much more out of
the new XenServer than they did out of XCP, both in terms of features,
and open source software. Please go visit the new XenServer.org [2]
website, and follow the download links to try XenServer 6.2. If you're
interested in the souce code itself, check out the XenServer
organisation on Github [3]. As we announced last week, the Xapi
Toolstack code is not at github.com/xapi-project [4].
Mike
[1]
http://www.xenserver.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79
[2] http://www.xenserver.org
[3] http://github.com/xenserver
[4] http://github.com/xapi-project
PS: I'll personally mail some free Xen Project swag to the first
person who can get XenCenter (https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin)
compiling on Linux or OSX with mono ;)
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