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

[Tao Shen <taoshen1983@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tim:

No its not. XenEnt is not GPL. It does not contain GPL code. It is not a
community 
developed product. How are they pushing anything? Xen (GPL) and Xen
(ENT) are two
completely different code bases from my understanding

Thanks for the lengthy reply.  For a long time, I was informed that the 
reason Xen Enterprise was not free was because of the extra 
administration utilities they developed, which wasn't free, wasn't open 
source.  Even when you go to www.xensource.com, under Xen Enterprise 
page, you clearly see that Xen Hypervisor is there, which I assumed that 
it's the open sourced Xen.   Now you say that Xen Enterprise is a 
completely closed, rewritten code base apart from Xen, then, I can only 
assume that it does not have any performance resemblance to the open 
source Xen or share any components or design.
Call me critical or skeptical, but the idea of a company running dual 
source trees of similiar products, one open source, one completely 
closed source,  is ...how should I say it, I wouldn't believe that the 
closed sourced one didn't have anything to do with the open source one.  
Yes, no matter how you try to convince me, I don't believe it.  In my 
mind, it's even worse than dual licensing.   Let's assume what you said 
is true, then XenSource isn't even a open source company, they just used 
the Xen open source project to draw people's interest into their closed 
sourced one with strikingly similar name.(how do you tell from just the 
name that Xen and Xen Enterprise are two completely different source trees?)
Oh well, too many trickeries involved, no matter how you slice and dice 
it, apple or orange.  Too bad, looks like I'd be stuck with VMware for a 
while.  BTW, I have no affiliations with VMware whatsoever.
Thanks for the input.




Tim Post wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 21:09 -0600, Tao Shen wrote:
>   
> > 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? 
> >     
> First, Xen is free software. While it is licensed under the GNU GPL
> License,
> it is free software. Please stop calling it open source. "Open Source"
> is a 
> misnomer. For a program to be free, its source is already considered to
> be 
> "Open", but that is just one requisite. To also be free, you must be
> able to
> copy it, share it, package it and sell it yourself.
>
> Some programs are open source but not free, many of them Microsoft
> programs.
> They have a developer network where members get a new set of CD's every
> quarter
> with new goodies on them that have source code included. This is open
> source, 
> not free. You can't share those programs or their source code, if you
> improve the 
> code the only people you can share your imrpovements with is Microsoft.
> Xen (GPL) is free software. Xen has (Keir would have to pull the patch
> graphs since 
> day1 to list them) _MANY_ substantial contributors who own the copyright
> to their 
> code. Just like the Linux kernel. In order for that to change, you would
> have to get 
> every single major contributor in agreement, I don't think that would
> ever happen.
>
> Unique (a bit) to Xen is the fact that so many major contributors are
> paid by their
> employers (such as AMD, IBM, Novell, and others). Depending on the
> agreement between
> the authors and their respective companies, those companies may also
> have a stake in 
> copyright.
>   
> > When Xen was doing their Xen Enterprise, Xen Windows, and Xen Express separation, 
> > I knew this XenSource was going to be bought.
> >     
> XenSource is shifting their development focus to a completely different
> kind of market
> for virtualization, did you read any of the press and subsequent buzz
> after the sale?
>
> Xen (Free) is seeing most adaptation on servers. Xen (ent) is going
> directly for desktop use and other uses in industry besides the typical
> PV dom-u farm.
>
> I'm sure that XenSource will keep an eye on the direction Xen is going,
> however they
> _must_ be completely different projects or they violate their own
> license unless they
> give you source code with XenEnt.
>
>   
> > 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.  
> >     
> No its not. XenEnt is not GPL. It does not contain GPL code. It is not a
> community 
> developed product. How are they pushing anything? Xen (GPL) and Xen
> (ENT) are two
> completely different code bases from my understanding, or you would get
> source code
> with XenEnt. XenSource does _NOT_ own the entire code base to Xen (GPL)
> and thus can
> not dual license it.
>
>   
> > At least that's 
> > my understanding of the GPL.  Doesn't anyone here smell something?  
> >     
> Yeah, but I suspect its coming from my armpit. Please don't dig up dirt
> outside to 
> throw on a perfectly clean floor inside. 
>
>   
> > Windows paravirtualization drivers are released in closed source.  That 
> > alone is fishy at best.
> >     
> They are under no obligation to release those drivers GPL. I think they
> were talking about it once, not sure what happened. If I'm correct,
> those drivers would need a bit of hacking to get into place anyway.
>
>   
> > 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?
> >     
> No, You should pay the people who wrote them. Actually, you shouldn't
> pay anyone. Don't use Microsoft products and the problem goes away :)
>
>   
> > Comparing this behavior to VMware or Parallels, at least VMware and 
> > Parallels wrote their code they are selling.  Every line of it.
> >     
> So did MySQL. Please, I don't know how to make it more clear, Xen (GPL)
> and XenEnt are different things totally. It seems like you have a
> misconception that XenEnt is a polished
> up version of the GPL version of Xen, it is not, it could not be, or
> XenSource violates its own license and has been for years. I _SINCERELY_
> doubt that :)
>
>   
> > 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)
> >     
> XenEnt is nothing like MySQL. Its a completely different code base and
> project. MySQL dual licenses their code and does not accept things
> beyond trivial patches so that they retain full copyright. 
>
> XenEnt is NOT free , its NOT open source. It just so happens that
> XenSource manages both code bases. One is a bag of apples, one is a bag
> of oranges. 
>
>   
> >   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.  
> >     
> I highly, highly doubt that. 
>
> Its one thing to ask questions when you don't understand things. Its
> another to propagate misinformation based on known misunderstandings (as
> you indicated, you aren't quite clear on it).
>
> It might be wise to refrain from such things in the future, or your only
> starting a fire 
> for the benefit of being the one to say 'fire'.
> Kindly,
> --Tim
>
>
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>   

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