[Cialug] Xen Source Acquired?

[Nathan C. Smith]

> 
> 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.
>
Do they share a marketing with Novell?

I will say one issue with their marketing is that their products tend to fit
strange niches and often solve problems you didn't realize were a problem
until you use and understand the solution- which may involve a paradigm
shift.
 
> 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.

Did Citrix develop this or aquire it?  It sounds a little like the "desktop
anywhere service" they aquired with GoToPC and now offer.
> 
> 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 may be alone in this opinion, or lack some data points, but it seems like
money and industry support does a good job of wrecking many good open source
projects.  I prefer them when they are still scrappy.  The latest
developments with MySQL come immediately to mind.  OF course Digium and
their hold on Asterisk via hardware.  I'm probably lacking some data points
or a wider point of view so feel free to enlighten me.

Some companies (IBM?) seem to do a better job of nurturing and cultivating
rather than acquiring and dominating the technology.

Feel free to educate me, my opinions are still forming.

-Nate