LinuxQuestions.org - XenServer Fully Open Sourced

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Today, Citrix announced that XenServer would be fully open sourced and that it will be made available from XenServer.org. First, I wanted to remind everyone that XenServer always has been based on open source software: containing the Xen hypervisor, the Linux kernel, the CentOS Linux distribution and user tools. However many XenServer components were proprietary.

In 2009, Citrix released XAPI – the XenServer management toolstack – and the XCP ISOs – a variant of XenServer that predominantly contains open source components – under open source licenses on xen.org. This marked the beginning of XenServer’s transition towards open source. In 2011, XAPI packages were delivered into Debian and Ubuntu, enabling users to build a XenServer like system from individual packages. Earlier this year, XAPI moved with Xen.org under the auspices of the Xen Project – a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. In other words, the XAPI project is now a sub-project of the Xen Project. The creation of XenServer.org as announced today concludes this journey towards open source.

Why is this good for our community?

One of the consequences of open sourcing XenServer components (aka XAPI) and XCP in stages was that it created confusion amongst developers and users. This was compounded because some software – such as the XCP build system – was not available as open source. The primary reason for this is that the source code, project and the packaging (XCP ISO and XAPI packages delivered into Linux distributions) were not cleanly defined.

Let’s first look at who will be responsible for what in the future:

More at the Xen Blog...

--jeremy