[Cialug] Xen Source Acquired?

[Josh More]

We've been talking about this internally.

(By the way, Alliance is a Citrix, XenSource, and Novell partner.)

First of all, it's inaccurate to say that Citrix hasn't done anything
innovative in years.  It would be more accurate to say that Citrix has
been amazingly bad at talking about their recent innovations.

Among one of Citrix's innovations is having a completely separate
desktop offering that is based on, but not directly tied to Windows. 
They offer this desktop over the wire to thin clients, Linux machines,
Macs, and other Windows workstations.  This puts them in direct
competition to VMWare's streaming desktop offering.  The problem was
that VMWare offered more than just desktops.

With Citrix owning XenSource, they can compete more directly against
VMWare.  That's good for them.  They can also consolidate their other
offerings (Application Firewall, etc) on a single appliance.  This would
reduce hardware cost for their customers, and be good for big business.

None of that is likely to affect most of us on the LUG list.

What will hit us is that Citrix needs Xen to support their latest and
greatest appliances, which could mean better cutting-edge hardware
support in Xen.  Also, since XenSource, Novell, Red Hat (and others) all
contribute to the Xen open source project, it could mean that XenSource
now has more resources to put into it.  That could be good as well. 
$500mil can go a long way to improving a project.

I seriously doubt that the Xen project will be negatively impacted,
given which companies have invested their time and (more importantly)
their people's skills into it.  Even if Citrix decides to shoot
themselves in the head by close-sourcing Xen, the other companies could
easily fork the GPL code and continue.

So, it may not be the best news, but I don't think of it as bad
either.


 

-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701



>>> "Nathan C. Smith" <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com> 08/15/07 2:29 PM >>> 


Citrix acquires XenSource!

http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/lp/lp_680809.asp?ntref=hp_promo1_US


Not sure what the ramifications are, but My initial reaction is
disappointment.

1) XenSource seemed to have a good thing going
2) Citrix hasn't done anything innovative in years

-Nate

Nathan Smith  McKee, Voorhees & Sease, P.L.C.  515.288.3667  
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