Five days after joining its friend Microsoft in walking away from rival VMWorld’s virtualization show, Citrix is portraying itself as the best friend of open source ever with the launch of the Xen Cloud Platform, an open source alternative to VMWare’s vCloud service.
The announcement was linked to Xen.org, the open source project Citrix has sponsored since acquiring Xensource in 2007.
The folks at Forrester call this a bold move, with Linux as its domain 0, a move toward greater cloud compatibility.
The political machinations here are complex. Maintain compatibility with VMWare and deploy your own open source cloud by aligning with an outfit Microsoft was said to be be ready to buy a year ago. (Our own Jason Perlow was among those asking the question, as shown at right.)
In fact the Citrix-Microsoft relationship has always been rather fraught, with analysts like Brian Madden asking who is controlling who.
So now both Citrix and Microsoft are acting like gate-crashers at VMWare’s party, claiming their solution is simpler than VMWare’s own vCenter suite. Oh, and more open source centric.
Can anyone out there relieve this headache I’m getting? I am certain a lover of soap operas can explain it. Meanwhile my question is, where does the interest of open source really lie in all this?
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