10.25.07
XenSource and Novell Come to Microsoft’s Rescue
What are partners for?
Finally. We have yet an argument which intersects with another that we frequently cover. XenSource was snatched along with Novell’s direction in order to work in isolation for virtualisation that favours Windows.
XenSource has worked closely with Red Hat and Novell to integrate Xen into their latest Linux distributions and is collborating closely with Microsoft on its implementation of Xen, dubbed Viridian, for Windows Server 2008. Citrix does not own an operating system but sells a platform that offers desktop and application virtualization, and now server virtualization.
“Xen and Novell were well paid and they now please Microsoft and help its fight against VMWare.”You can hopefully see that Xen is in some sense converging with Viridian under the new Citrix/Microsoft regime [1, 2, 3, 4]. As we emphasised in the past, Ron Hovsepian envisions a future where Linux is only run as a guest atop Windows in the datacentre [1, 2, 4]. Also consider as an example yesterday’s news about patents and licensing (anti-GPL venom) in Microsoft’s Linux virtualisation and the Vista/Longhorn discriminatory EULA.
This comes at a very crucial time because virtualisation is very quickly made more popular and as VMWare skyrockets, Microsoft is left further behind. Here is a fragment from the report about VMware posting a 90% revenue jump.
Microsoft has in recent months attempted to curtail VMware’s stance as market leader in the field of software virtualisation by buddying up with Citrix and Novell.
Xen and Novell were well paid and they now please Microsoft and help its fight against VMWare. They are both pawns in a game dominated by kings and queens. Viridian is well behind and Microsoft knows that it needs to recruit other companies to beat VMWare. Ironically, even open source and Linux companies are now helping Microsoft beat VMWare, which is rather Linux-oriented (VMWare even uses a hacked 2.4 Linux kernel in one of its products). Also, ironically, Xen and Novell used to actually compete against Microsoft, not help it.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.