Re: [Xen-users] Does it legal to analysize XEN source code and write a book about it ?

[Tao Shen <taoshen1983@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well, my point is this: if you have "analysize"d Xen, perhaps you 
shouldn't have written a book about it, at least not in English.
On the issue of Xen being purchased by Citrix, I was wondering about the 
issues of legality.  Is it even legal for a corporation(Citrix) to 
purchase an open source package, of which was contributed by thousands 
of open source developers, and is it legal for a corporation(XenSource) 
who basically combines a lot of open source package(qemu device drivers 
and their paravirtualization based on the linux kernel) into one to sell 
the technology as if they owned it?   When Xen was doing their Xen 
Enterprise, Xen Windows, and Xen Express separation, I knew this 
XenSource was going to be bought.   While it's perfectly legal for 
XenSource to provide open source service...selling support packages(to 
amazon EC2 for example), but forcing the bundling of support with an 
"enterprise" edition is pushing the boundaries of GPL.  At least that's 
my understanding of the GPL.  Doesn't anyone here smell something?  
Windows paravirtualization drivers are released in closed source.  That 
alone is fishy at best.  Also, I had this question:  even though 
Microsoft had a deal with XenSource to bundle windows paravirtualization 
drivers with Xen, shouldn't we pay Microsoft for the drivers instead of 
paying XenSource for their Xen "Windows" Edition?
Comparing this behavior to VMware or Parallels, at least VMware and 
Parallels wrote their code they are selling.  Every line of it.  VMware 
workstation 6 will also be using paravirtualization techniques.  VMware 
ESX was criticized for using Linux as the backend...but the point is: 
Vmware wrote very single line of their own kernel that runs on top of 
linux kernel including device emulation, and windows drivers even.  Xen 
cannot say the same.  For one thing:  all their devices are emulated by 
qemu.  That's why they can't do 3D yet like VMware and parallels.
Enough rambling.  It's too bad the open source community has turned into 
this way:  giving a limited basic version and upselling an Enterprise 
version and continue to ask for open source developer to code their 
stuff for free(MySQL comes to mind)  There is a reason why CentOS was 
forked from RHEL and why OpenSuSE was a fork of SLES.  I predict that 
there will be a fork of openXen from the last checkpoint where Xen was 
bought.  To me personally, it just doesn't make any sense that XenSource 
is capitalizing on the work of thousands of engineers from INTEL, 
AMD...shouldn't the developers who contributed to be paid individually 
as well?
So, in conclusion, Jian, I think you should be free of legal issues to 
write a book about the source code or at least the code before it was 
bought.(I think the freedom of speech alone justifies it), btw, the 
first line was a joke, don't be offended.


jian zhang wrote:
> Hi all:
>  Previously we have analysize Xen source code, and we have wrote a 
> book about the code. BUT now, I noticed that xen has been purchased by 
> Citrix <http://www.cnetnews.com.cn/list-0-0-16406-0-1.htm>, so does it 
> legal to publish that book???
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

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