Recently, I had an interview with Xen Community Manager, Stephen Spector. I wanted to discover Xen's success and Clients as well as how important has been the open-source in Xen development and philosophy.
Xen since it was created- The Xen hypervisor was first created by Keir Fraser and Ian Pratt as part of the Xenoserver research project at Cambridge University in the late 1990s. A hypervisor "forms the core of each Xenoserver node, providing the resource management, accounting and auditing that we require". This company now supports the development of the open source project and also sells enterprise versions of the software. The first public release of Xen occurred in 2003. This first public release uses a type of virtualization called "paravirtualization." This is essentially a software method of interfacing virtual machines to the host hardware...sort of an API.
Now, in 2010, Xen has known a great evolution: many companies use Xen as a virtualization platform. They resell or ship it. Among them, we can quote: Citrix, Oracle, Cisco, Novell, Fujitsu, Samsung, Lenovo, Avaya, Red Hat, etc. As for customers, the list is more difficult to make. Citrix, Oracle, Novell, etc customers running Xen are thousands and thousands each so it is hard to estimate. "We also don't have an accurate count of how many people download the Xen hypervisor, compile and use it themselves", said Stephen J. Cogswell.
The open source feature and the Community are very important to Xen: "Over 300 companies and developers has contributed just for last year. Moreover, Xen strongly remains open-source allowing anyone to contribute to the code via an open mailing list methodology where the code is judged for its validity and usefulness. All good code is accepted, regardless of the person/company submitting", added Stephen J. Cogswell -a word to the wise...
As for TIO Libre principles, when I asked him his opinion, he answered me: "Xen.org is open source with all software GPL licensed. I believe that the Free Software movement goes beyond this licensing by asking that all software be free and thus is not in agreement with many of our members; however as a community, Xen.org believes in open software under GPL and doesn't sell any software we produce, it is all free."
Upcoming event for Xen community- The Xen.org community is hosting a 2 day track within Linuxcon Brazil. Presentations about how the open source virtualization hypervisor is used in cloud and enterprise computing infrastructures and how partners such as Citrix leverage the open source solution for their virtualization products will be held. It is also an opportunity to meet actors of the Xen's community. Lan Pratt, founder of Xen.org and keynote for LinuxCon Brazil as well as Stephen Spector, Community Manager for Xen.org will attend the event.
Interview by Elodie Pot - writer
The Free Cloud Alliance will also attend LinuxConBrazil 2010...
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