What I find interesting is the aversion to paying for what is essential a product mostly used by businesses.
I get the non-profit,school dilemma. and ideally, they do something about that.
but they aren't closing the source of their system ( everything is remaining open source ). They are removing some value add that for the most part, only business users care about. ( to the binaries they provide, are they forced to give you free compile time and bandwidth too? )
For example, I myself have been guilty in previous companies of spending $1M in hardware, and have used the free version of xenserver ( 120 huge vm node deployment, hybrid cloud ), to great success, and Citrix as a company has gotten zero of that.
So here I am, an user extremely happy with software that is being used to run a multi million dollar, profitable business, spending $8-15k per server, and giving zero to the company that made part of this deployment successful.
I gave hundreds of thousands to dell ( and indirectly intel, ram manufacturers, etc )
I gave hundreds of thousands to Arista ( including support and software licenses )
but zero to Citrix, because they gave me such a great free product, i didn't need their support.
License fees have certainly been out of whack with many of these companies ( per socket licensing for example ), but the fact remains, they are providing a business value, and should be compensated. ( and no, ovirt isn't quite there yet, vmware is, but that's even more expensive ).
Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.
I think the majority of complaints will come from small firms that don't have budgets for expansive licensing. I work with a nonprofit that has multiple labs setup, we have AD integration, RBAC, and use GPU passthrough features in the lab. All of this is run on donated or EOL hardware. We take in $0 in cash funding and only accept hardware and volunteer time. For us it basically means we either (fail to upgrade) or look for alternatives.
I think the modeling of being paid is fair and businesses should work towards paying something. Even then though, it's tough because licensing adds up. Some of the startups we mentor that are running XEN have very similar setups to the non profit. Many are running older EOL Dell servers with multisocket. One startup we work with has 5 servers in a rack, all purchased for under $1500. With the standard pricing agreement from Citrix, that would work out to $7,630 per year. This is all expected from a completely bootstrapped (pre-funding) startup.
I think it's a bad faith move removing features, I understand pushing the support need, but that can be addressed in a different manner.
>Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.
Totally respect where you're coming from - but at some point isn't that kind of their problem? It's not your job to monetize it for them.
I respect them making this move, however I think they had better options. Part of their problem is it's TOUGH to go from giving something away to monetizing. At the same time the people like you who were making a profit off of it probably will begrudgingly pay for the upgrade.
I think they should've gone the Redhat route - where they only release source to patches between releases. If you REALLY want to apply the code and build the new binaries yourself, so be it. If you find value in them writing and providing the patches - pay for it.
There is no perfect answer, but I think the people calling for their heads are being a bit silly. I have no doubt the two options were: make this change, or kill the project entirely. ESPECIALLY in the face of Amazon moving away from Xen - I would imagine there was some back-end funding going on there.
Oh of course, but I'm a big believer in social contracts. What can I say :)
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Citrix used to have XCP ( Xen Cloud Platform ), as a way of OSS the core functionality away from the paid functionality. They moved to one build in the possibly naive thought that making licensing a feature of a support contract, would enforce a social contract of "hey, why not pay these guys".
That did not work.
I think AWS moving away from XEN is a bit moot. While AWS did contribute back some to XEN, they mostly forked it for their use case. They are doing the same with KVM. Citrix has been by enlarge, the majority contributor to XEN.
No, you don't get it: it's NOT Open Source. Because currently, there is NO way to build it from the sources.
Putting the sources on GitHub is something, but only with a very complicated build process which is not documented or even using URL's that are private/internal to Citrix.
So the rule is never to reply to a throwaway account. But what a load of entitled crap is this?!!
There is a way to do it, you just don't want to figure it out. You want to FORCE them to figure it out for you. BooHoo.
Again, this is a commercial product, that they open sourced. Their commitment was to release the source. They then additionally went thru the step of providing free services ( free binaries, open support system, etc ). This has not worked out for them, they also need to run as a business. They are still giving you ALL of the source.
RedHat went thru a similar period, and in all honesty, was the only thing that saved them as a company.
If a Centos projects comes out of this, awesome. if XCP ( Xen Cloud Platform ) comes back as a volunteer project, awesome too!
"Opensource" is about many things. But to me, and many others, one of the early core tenements has been that the users of a product help out in some way. It doesn't mean you get to whine your way into others doing free work for you.
The GPL anticipated this sort of thing which is why it required not just the source code to be released but all the build scripts and ancillary documentation required to actually use the source code. If they didn't incorporate anyone else's GPL code then they aren't in breach but its still a bait and switch.
Hey listen, I'm living selling an Open Source product. So I know a bit how it works and what business means.
There is a gap between not posting a doc and having no way to build it because it uses internal Citrix URL to the dependencies. I'll will try to figure it out by myself, but I suppose you have no idea regarding the huge task it is.
This is not a normal situation: you can't brag you are open source but avoid people to build it themselves (that's what happening actually). You need to be clear about that. I have no problem if they remove the sources, at least the message is clear. But telling it's Open Source without providing something you can actually build IS the problem.
This is a major issue - even if the current set of features in the free version are sufficient for a particular project, this action means that we can't rely on long-term goodwill of them staying that way, so any future-proof project should use something that's more free.
Precisely. Lacking that goodwill, any potential user would be ill advised to begin using the free version. Current free users would be ill advised to continue with no guarantee of bug & security fixes, because near as I can tell these changes weren't obvious from prior product roadmaps.
I don't see a problem with them charging for these features. What I don't like is it appears to have been part of a longer term bait and switch strategy designed to hook users that might otherwise have chosen OSS, with gradual feature removal as the stick used to beat locked in users into paying.
It’s just as likely that they originally hoped their model would result in enough conversion to paying customers that they could keep funding development but that things didn’t work out as they’d expected. I would never assume the ‘bait and switch’ tactic unless it was a Microsoft or Oracle product.
Maybe you haven't had the pleasure of dealing with Citrix as a vendor then, or have been extremely fortunate in that relationship. I myself would grant them no such pass. But I would hesitate to place even Microsoft into the vile sphere of desolation and malice occupied by Oracle, though admitedly my experience with MS has been limited to their bog standard products and licensing.
Microsoft can be bad, but I think Oracle is run on pure spite.
According to legend (I wasn't actually there - this is secondhand, so do take with a grain of salt), they tried to convince a company I worked with previously that they needed an additional license for the server that processed backups. No Oracle client or server installed; the logs were pushed via ssh. When they balked, Oracle tried to increase the price two more times. It was apparently great motivation to move to MySQL.
Maybe that was just one particularly bad rep, but I don't think I've gone through a single year of my career without hearing something absurd about them.
My story with the big O stems from one of their ERP systems. It got pretty tangled, but here's the 2-minute version:
A contract was signed and during early implementation Oracle EOL'ed a significant module with a replacement that was planned but did not exist. Followed by attempts to charge us for their development of the replacement which, again, had been a pre-paid module in their off-the-shelf ERP. Already paid for.
That didn't fly, but later the replacement lacked key features: A web-facing portion collected information. We demo, it works, we ask where data processing folks view it in the forms app... crickets. Conversation ensues:
O: "It's in the database"
Me: Sure, but where do users view it when collating the other information?
O: "Well, a dba can get to it"
Me: Okay, but when we go live, will it show up as a another tab in a form or...?
O: "We've completed our build of this feature"
Me: Hold on, collecting & processing this data is a critical and contractually itemized deliverable. You have developed half of that deliverable.
O: "We've completed out build of this feature"
I was probably fortunate that my CIO was there, and took over at that point. A few weeks later, Oracle walked off the job. There had been delays in a modules I wasn't involved with, and Oracle wanted more money. It was a fixed-price contract, and we wouldn't re-open negotiation on a signed contract already multiple milestones in on its payment schedule. Oracle walked. Literally gone, no word, no message, just dozens of people that were there on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. That's Oracle.
Interesting that you mention their ERP systems. One of the projects I'm working with right now has been considering integrating with one, as well. Last week, our CTO put together a big list of pros and cons between the different possible integrations for discussion. The top of the list of cons was "Oracle owns them".
Bryan Cantrill says it best, I think[1]: "If you had to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of WWII but was an oracle customer, there's a very good chance you would actually explain the Nazis as an Oracle allegory."
There are more choice quotes in someone else's HN comment about Bryan Cantrill on Oracle.[2] I highly recommend any talk you can find of Bryan Cantrill. A wonderful mix of industry history and great delivery.
That's chic rhetoric to appeal to engineers that can see the technical value they snubbed intentionally and accidentally in a variety of acquisitions, and just comical to the layman as an extremest view of Ellison's galactic ego quest, but all Oracle really is is an average integration/systems engineering company with one of the best sales and delivery vehicles out in front. They are pretty much nonentities when it comes to new product development, yet they rake in jobs by doing the legwork to structure and execute the deals. I'd go as far as saying they have more in common with a consulting company like Accenture than any tech company despite a ton of marketing and a small amount of product development to try and convince the buyer otherwise. There's something to be learned here for the intended audience of this site, and it doesn't involve genocidal hyperbole. Sales and delivery are supreme.
They may have decent initial sales, but their delivery sucks; the whole point of this discussion is that there are a lot of customers who have been sold but are absolutely not satisfied with what they're getting.
Also, their (re)licensing process for existing customers pretty much amounts to extortion. You better be really sure about how much it would take to rewrite your systems without Oracle, have a plan how it would be done, and advertise it to them - because as soon as they'll feel a lock-in, prepare to open the wallet for ridiculous sums for trifling things that you've been doing for years for free, but now their lawyers can find an weird interpretation where that requires extra licenses; they don't even attempt to increase the revenue by providing some extra value or service for you but simply by applying their muscle.
While much of what you say is true, it fails to get at the extent to which they not only forego innovation, but actually remove innovation from the general market by buying the companies/patents in question and then making them exclusive to the Oracle ecosystem. It's mercenary rent seeking to a degree that isn't often seen elsewhere, and as such we all suffer for it.
It's not pure capitalism, which would provide mechanisms for dealing with this, and it's not too much regulation, which could also prevent this, it's just the right amount of both that allows Oracle to play them against each other to game the system.
My favorite memory from a previous employer was the day that Oracle called back with the results of their licensing audit.
I sat outside the door of the CIO's office. He wasn't expecting anything shocking and so left the door open during the call. Oracle had previously told us that we wouldn't have to pay for licenses for non-prod instances. When they went back on that promise, the CIO said (well, shouted) "Okay, fine! Tell me how much you're going to fuck me. As soon as you're done with that, I'll fuck you right back by throwing Oracle out of my datacenter!"
I dont know where you're going with this. I offered my opinion of their motives. If you have a criticism there's no need to evade, out with it and we can have a duscussion.
Yes, I made up my opinion[0]. The basis of it was the article, and my interpretation of the chain of actions it showed by citrix. That would be the end of it, except you seem to have an issue with the direction of my interpretation. That's fine, I like discussing opinions, mine and other people's. I'm happy to do so here too, if your line of questioning extends beyond having me point out that I stated an opinion. If not, that's okay too, lot's of other interesting discussions on HN.
How so - this is still OSS. You're free to build it yourself if you want to. Honestly how spoiled are you that you DEMAND a corporation not only give you the source to the code they built, but also build it for you, and patch it for you, while paying the bandwidth bills for you to easily download it. If you want FREE then put in the hour of work to build it from source yourself.
If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes.
Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project.
I always prefer KVM in the limited VPS needs I have. It always seems a lot more flexible and less expensive to have a single larger instance in which I can nest my own VMs and spin up as needed. Of course Docker might obviate the requirement for nestability, but I havent used Docker much, and have a certain comfort level with pre build VMs Ive created for various stock purposes.
Which Linux distro do you recommend for running KVM? Additionally, SmartOS has good support for running KVM virtual machines [1]. It gives good solid stability and integration with ZFS, not sure of the performance though vs Linux. The main downside of SmartOS is somewhat sporadic hardware support (broadcom nic's out, intel nic's in). I prefer SmartOS now where I can, but knowing which Linux distro is useful especially for GPU support.
No, the contents of the instances are managed by a separate NixOps network, since it would be wasteful to send the full image (~1GB) for each instance each time a package is updated.
The purpose of the base image is to preinstall something that's ready for NixOps to "take over" with whatever I actually want to run on the VM.
The management tools along with the stability of the overall system. Debian might be a good choice for stability. Though it seems Redhat (maybe CentOS?) has a good lead on much of the KVM enterprise tools.
Until the changes announced in this blog post there were features in the free version of Xen that did not exist in the free version of ESXi (like live migration of hosts - without shared storage!)
as someone notes above, all Xen versions (including enterprise) are OSS so you can build and run them without paying for commercial support. the packages are just the supported, pre-built, “easy” path
VMWare has very little OSS, especially for their equivalents of Xen server. Id support KVM and co before VMWare just on those grounds alone
oVirt is great, but if you’re doing single node deployments in a homelab ESXi is my first recommendation. oVirt can’t put the only host available in a cluster in maintenance mode, just like vCenter - so it’s an exercise in frustration trying to update anything without it freaking out.
So we've got a company spending millions of dollars developing a piece of software, and then giving away all the source for free. And you think they should be forced to give you documentation on how to build it... why?
I mean, seriously the entitlement is astounding to me. OF COURSE they're going to make it difficult to build on your own, that's part of the monetization strategy. If you don't want to pay for it, and you also don't want to spend the time figuring out how to build it on your own, don't use it. But to act as if they owe you something is... ridiculous.
In the first place open source is a set of principals that is designed to inspire people to freely share with one another including the sweat of their brow in the form of direct contribution of work as opposed to cash.
Trying to make that sharing onerous is a violation of those principals and its not entitlement to point this out.
Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
So imagine it takes 1 person who is paid 120k a year a few weeks to produce a viable solution and documentation. The cost of this solution is about 2k and scales to infinity people.
In a universe where nobody communicates or collaborates I suppose you could imagine that everyone would pay 10k instead of paying 2k in labor for an officially supported solution perhaps in consideration for other value provided like tech support.
The problem is that this fails to consider the fact that someone might actually donate this labor for free to everyone negating the benefit of this particular moat.
It also creates a situation where someone might be inspired to put in the 2k worth of labor and charge 100 users $199 each and come out ahead.
Its certain that a number of players have earned money selling some sort of value add on top of open source software but the value add really needs to be something that you have a competitive advantage at providing not something trivial like a difficult build process.
>Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
Really? Because that's exactly what Redhat does and they've been continually held up as the shining example of "open source works!" for several decades now...
I'm looking at the feature matrix and free is missing "Automated Updates via XenCenter" but the way it's worded I don't know if it's a change or not. Right now XenCenter automatically alerts me of updates and lets me run them from XenCenter...
Xenserver in my experience at least the free edition is not as polished or stable as ESXi or even regular libvirt/KVM.
I experimented with the 7.2 Free edition and right from the installation not succeeding at first to many other things not working as expected it was not a very good experience. The management client UI is also Windows only I think and it's very sub par.
Given the new changes I wonder anyone would have any reason to run xenserver free edition. There's always ESXi, HyperV and good ole KVM (which maybe an issue if you run Windows server as a VM.)
Yep, all my rack servers run ESXi and except for the once in a blue moon patch I don't remember having to mess with them. And with the HTML5 UI starting to mature enough it's a sweet deal. My other choice is client HyperV from W10 on my workstations - too many updates but other than that pretty good to run supported VMs - suspend/resume to kill noise and domain joined machines mean headless management!
I agree; every day we stray further from the fundamentals. Xen, and to a lesser extent Docker, and other tools, do help beautify some of the underlying technologies and processes that may have come before them, but that does not make the usability sacrifice justified in situations like these.
I'm afraid I don't have a holistic answer, in this instance, that satisfies the requirement that the developers eat and be clothed, and that the users have an unimpeded work flow. Maybe it's a moral solution needed between all users, of all payment tiers, to agree not to abuse the intent of the permissive nature of the free-tier user agreement. It will be interesting seeing how this plays out.
Possibly licensing? Not sure though, I run my gaming VM at home with hardware passthrough and basically no issues (except fairly slow disk i/o, maybe that is the issue?). I think KVM is simply stronger when it comes to resource management with its VMs also running the linux kernel, it doesn't get as much freedom to balance load across your windows VMs.
EDIT: The correct answer was posted by blinkingled before I finished typing this up hahah, read their post instead of this one :)
David makes an important clarification in the comments:
"I think it's important to differentiate between the pricing of the product from Citrix, and the source code licensing model. XenServer (all editions) remains open source, with the ability for anyone to head over to Github and peruse the code, contribute patches, and so forth. What's changing is what features Citrix puts into the free edition that it builds, tests, and maintains; all of those are still open source, though."
What exactly would it mean to exclude features from an edition you provide the source for? Wouldn't anyone just be able to get a copy of the source and build the fully-featured edition anyways? How would these features even migrate - surely you could patch them back in to future version.
Right, that's the point. People who want it all for free and don't want to pay citrix anything are free to do so by compiling it from the source. This is 'unsupported' by citrix and you are free to do whatever you want.
The binaries as provided by citrix come in 3 editions. These changes apply to those editions. These are 'supported' by citrix.
What license is the source distributed under? I think any licenses that are truly open source would allow anyone else to distribute binaries too, so people could get binaries from such a distribution rather than compile themselves.
I guess there might be a reason compiling to distribute binaries would be a time-consuming pain? (Or compiling yourself, for that matter).
This is very disappointing to hear. I have actually migrated two nodes from proxmox to xenserver + xenorchestra not that long ago. I have no need for a full blown HA environment with dedicated NAS. I didn't have hardware capable of running proxmox on zfs + zfs-sync for a two node setup. Xenserver + xenorchestra (with its continious replication feature for backups) fit the bill much better than proxmox for this use case.
Companies that give away core technology for "Free" are always plagued with the perceptive one way door that gets created. There is never a good way out of the situation for either party. The company got the benefit of building a client base with low barrier to entry, but then struggles to maintain profitability after their support/ops burden increases. On the other side, the customer bases profitability and business model was hinged on their ability to innovate to reduce their margins, and now are forced to drastically alter their business plans.
The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point.
Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.
What I find interesting is the aversion to paying for what is essential a product mostly used by businesses.
I get the non-profit,school dilemma. and ideally, they do something about that.
but they aren't closing the source of their system ( everything is remaining open source ). They are removing some value add that for the most part, only business users care about. ( to the binaries they provide, are they forced to give you free compile time and bandwidth too? )
For example, I myself have been guilty in previous companies of spending $1M in hardware, and have used the free version of xenserver ( 120 huge vm node deployment, hybrid cloud ), to great success, and Citrix as a company has gotten zero of that.
So here I am, an user extremely happy with software that is being used to run a multi million dollar, profitable business, spending $8-15k per server, and giving zero to the company that made part of this deployment successful.
I gave hundreds of thousands to dell ( and indirectly intel, ram manufacturers, etc ) I gave hundreds of thousands to Arista ( including support and software licenses )
but zero to Citrix, because they gave me such a great free product, i didn't need their support.
License fees have certainly been out of whack with many of these companies ( per socket licensing for example ), but the fact remains, they are providing a business value, and should be compensated. ( and no, ovirt isn't quite there yet, vmware is, but that's even more expensive ).
Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.
I think the majority of complaints will come from small firms that don't have budgets for expansive licensing. I work with a nonprofit that has multiple labs setup, we have AD integration, RBAC, and use GPU passthrough features in the lab. All of this is run on donated or EOL hardware. We take in $0 in cash funding and only accept hardware and volunteer time. For us it basically means we either (fail to upgrade) or look for alternatives.
I think the modeling of being paid is fair and businesses should work towards paying something. Even then though, it's tough because licensing adds up. Some of the startups we mentor that are running XEN have very similar setups to the non profit. Many are running older EOL Dell servers with multisocket. One startup we work with has 5 servers in a rack, all purchased for under $1500. With the standard pricing agreement from Citrix, that would work out to $7,630 per year. This is all expected from a completely bootstrapped (pre-funding) startup.
I think it's a bad faith move removing features, I understand pushing the support need, but that can be addressed in a different manner.
>Not sure what the answer is here, but I do feel that if you are a money making business, buying servers for thousands, a percentage of that should go to the software you use to make those servers useful.
Totally respect where you're coming from - but at some point isn't that kind of their problem? It's not your job to monetize it for them.
I respect them making this move, however I think they had better options. Part of their problem is it's TOUGH to go from giving something away to monetizing. At the same time the people like you who were making a profit off of it probably will begrudgingly pay for the upgrade.
I think they should've gone the Redhat route - where they only release source to patches between releases. If you REALLY want to apply the code and build the new binaries yourself, so be it. If you find value in them writing and providing the patches - pay for it.
There is no perfect answer, but I think the people calling for their heads are being a bit silly. I have no doubt the two options were: make this change, or kill the project entirely. ESPECIALLY in the face of Amazon moving away from Xen - I would imagine there was some back-end funding going on there.
Oh of course, but I'm a big believer in social contracts. What can I say :)
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Citrix used to have XCP ( Xen Cloud Platform ), as a way of OSS the core functionality away from the paid functionality. They moved to one build in the possibly naive thought that making licensing a feature of a support contract, would enforce a social contract of "hey, why not pay these guys".
That did not work.
I think AWS moving away from XEN is a bit moot. While AWS did contribute back some to XEN, they mostly forked it for their use case. They are doing the same with KVM. Citrix has been by enlarge, the majority contributor to XEN.
No, you don't get it: it's NOT Open Source. Because currently, there is NO way to build it from the sources.
Putting the sources on GitHub is something, but only with a very complicated build process which is not documented or even using URL's that are private/internal to Citrix.
That's why people start to push Citrix to at least release a documentation on the build process and/or exploring the difficulty to build it. See https://xen-orchestra.com/forum/topic/562/xenserver-7-3-and-... and also the Citrix thread regarding that: https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/391868-xenserver-73-ann...
So far, no answer from Citrix.
So the rule is never to reply to a throwaway account. But what a load of entitled crap is this?!!
There is a way to do it, you just don't want to figure it out. You want to FORCE them to figure it out for you. BooHoo.
Again, this is a commercial product, that they open sourced. Their commitment was to release the source. They then additionally went thru the step of providing free services ( free binaries, open support system, etc ). This has not worked out for them, they also need to run as a business. They are still giving you ALL of the source.
RedHat went thru a similar period, and in all honesty, was the only thing that saved them as a company.
If a Centos projects comes out of this, awesome. if XCP ( Xen Cloud Platform ) comes back as a volunteer project, awesome too!
"Opensource" is about many things. But to me, and many others, one of the early core tenements has been that the users of a product help out in some way. It doesn't mean you get to whine your way into others doing free work for you.
The GPL anticipated this sort of thing which is why it required not just the source code to be released but all the build scripts and ancillary documentation required to actually use the source code. If they didn't incorporate anyone else's GPL code then they aren't in breach but its still a bait and switch.
It's using massively GPLv2 code from everywhere (plus XAPI and Xen are Linux foundation projects!).
GPL compliance requires you to provide build scripts.
We just need one of the copyright holders to force the issue then.
I wouldn't go this way, personally (David vs Goliath). At least, not after exploring almost all other options.
Hey listen, I'm living selling an Open Source product. So I know a bit how it works and what business means.
There is a gap between not posting a doc and having no way to build it because it uses internal Citrix URL to the dependencies. I'll will try to figure it out by myself, but I suppose you have no idea regarding the huge task it is.
This is not a normal situation: you can't brag you are open source but avoid people to build it themselves (that's what happening actually). You need to be clear about that. I have no problem if they remove the sources, at least the message is clear. But telling it's Open Source without providing something you can actually build IS the problem.
This is a major issue - even if the current set of features in the free version are sufficient for a particular project, this action means that we can't rely on long-term goodwill of them staying that way, so any future-proof project should use something that's more free.
Precisely. Lacking that goodwill, any potential user would be ill advised to begin using the free version. Current free users would be ill advised to continue with no guarantee of bug & security fixes, because near as I can tell these changes weren't obvious from prior product roadmaps.
I don't see a problem with them charging for these features. What I don't like is it appears to have been part of a longer term bait and switch strategy designed to hook users that might otherwise have chosen OSS, with gradual feature removal as the stick used to beat locked in users into paying.
It’s just as likely that they originally hoped their model would result in enough conversion to paying customers that they could keep funding development but that things didn’t work out as they’d expected. I would never assume the ‘bait and switch’ tactic unless it was a Microsoft or Oracle product.
Maybe you haven't had the pleasure of dealing with Citrix as a vendor then, or have been extremely fortunate in that relationship. I myself would grant them no such pass. But I would hesitate to place even Microsoft into the vile sphere of desolation and malice occupied by Oracle, though admitedly my experience with MS has been limited to their bog standard products and licensing.
Microsoft can be bad, but I think Oracle is run on pure spite.
According to legend (I wasn't actually there - this is secondhand, so do take with a grain of salt), they tried to convince a company I worked with previously that they needed an additional license for the server that processed backups. No Oracle client or server installed; the logs were pushed via ssh. When they balked, Oracle tried to increase the price two more times. It was apparently great motivation to move to MySQL.
Maybe that was just one particularly bad rep, but I don't think I've gone through a single year of my career without hearing something absurd about them.
My story with the big O stems from one of their ERP systems. It got pretty tangled, but here's the 2-minute version:
A contract was signed and during early implementation Oracle EOL'ed a significant module with a replacement that was planned but did not exist. Followed by attempts to charge us for their development of the replacement which, again, had been a pre-paid module in their off-the-shelf ERP. Already paid for.
That didn't fly, but later the replacement lacked key features: A web-facing portion collected information. We demo, it works, we ask where data processing folks view it in the forms app... crickets. Conversation ensues:
O: "It's in the database"
Me: Sure, but where do users view it when collating the other information?
O: "Well, a dba can get to it"
Me: Okay, but when we go live, will it show up as a another tab in a form or...?
O: "We've completed our build of this feature"
Me: Hold on, collecting & processing this data is a critical and contractually itemized deliverable. You have developed half of that deliverable.
O: "We've completed out build of this feature"
I was probably fortunate that my CIO was there, and took over at that point. A few weeks later, Oracle walked off the job. There had been delays in a modules I wasn't involved with, and Oracle wanted more money. It was a fixed-price contract, and we wouldn't re-open negotiation on a signed contract already multiple milestones in on its payment schedule. Oracle walked. Literally gone, no word, no message, just dozens of people that were there on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. That's Oracle.
Interesting that you mention their ERP systems. One of the projects I'm working with right now has been considering integrating with one, as well. Last week, our CTO put together a big list of pros and cons between the different possible integrations for discussion. The top of the list of cons was "Oracle owns them".
Bryan Cantrill says it best, I think[1]: "If you had to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of WWII but was an oracle customer, there's a very good chance you would actually explain the Nazis as an Oracle allegory."
There are more choice quotes in someone else's HN comment about Bryan Cantrill on Oracle.[2] I highly recommend any talk you can find of Bryan Cantrill. A wonderful mix of industry history and great delivery.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m35s
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040429
That's chic rhetoric to appeal to engineers that can see the technical value they snubbed intentionally and accidentally in a variety of acquisitions, and just comical to the layman as an extremest view of Ellison's galactic ego quest, but all Oracle really is is an average integration/systems engineering company with one of the best sales and delivery vehicles out in front. They are pretty much nonentities when it comes to new product development, yet they rake in jobs by doing the legwork to structure and execute the deals. I'd go as far as saying they have more in common with a consulting company like Accenture than any tech company despite a ton of marketing and a small amount of product development to try and convince the buyer otherwise. There's something to be learned here for the intended audience of this site, and it doesn't involve genocidal hyperbole. Sales and delivery are supreme.
They may have decent initial sales, but their delivery sucks; the whole point of this discussion is that there are a lot of customers who have been sold but are absolutely not satisfied with what they're getting.
Also, their (re)licensing process for existing customers pretty much amounts to extortion. You better be really sure about how much it would take to rewrite your systems without Oracle, have a plan how it would be done, and advertise it to them - because as soon as they'll feel a lock-in, prepare to open the wallet for ridiculous sums for trifling things that you've been doing for years for free, but now their lawyers can find an weird interpretation where that requires extra licenses; they don't even attempt to increase the revenue by providing some extra value or service for you but simply by applying their muscle.
While much of what you say is true, it fails to get at the extent to which they not only forego innovation, but actually remove innovation from the general market by buying the companies/patents in question and then making them exclusive to the Oracle ecosystem. It's mercenary rent seeking to a degree that isn't often seen elsewhere, and as such we all suffer for it.
It's not pure capitalism, which would provide mechanisms for dealing with this, and it's not too much regulation, which could also prevent this, it's just the right amount of both that allows Oracle to play them against each other to game the system.
My favorite memory from a previous employer was the day that Oracle called back with the results of their licensing audit.
I sat outside the door of the CIO's office. He wasn't expecting anything shocking and so left the door open during the call. Oracle had previously told us that we wouldn't have to pay for licenses for non-prod instances. When they went back on that promise, the CIO said (well, shouted) "Okay, fine! Tell me how much you're going to fuck me. As soon as you're done with that, I'll fuck you right back by throwing Oracle out of my datacenter!"
What makes it appear to be part of a long-term strategy? I don't see any evidence in the post itself. Care to share what you've found?
My original comment is pretty short, but I think its words adequately convey that I was providing my interpretation of the sequence of events.
Okay, I just assumed you used the words as commonly understood. You can certainly say or believe anything you want. I wasn't challenging that.
I dont know where you're going with this. I offered my opinion of their motives. If you have a criticism there's no need to evade, out with it and we can have a duscussion.
There is no room for discussion. You made up something. I assumed you had evidence, you did not. That was the end of it.
Yes, I made up my opinion[0]. The basis of it was the article, and my interpretation of the chain of actions it showed by citrix. That would be the end of it, except you seem to have an issue with the direction of my interpretation. That's fine, I like discussing opinions, mine and other people's. I'm happy to do so here too, if your line of questioning extends beyond having me point out that I stated an opinion. If not, that's okay too, lot's of other interesting discussions on HN.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opinion#Noun
How so - this is still OSS. You're free to build it yourself if you want to. Honestly how spoiled are you that you DEMAND a corporation not only give you the source to the code they built, but also build it for you, and patch it for you, while paying the bandwidth bills for you to easily download it. If you want FREE then put in the hour of work to build it from source yourself.
If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes.
Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...
https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-som...
https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)
I always prefer KVM in the limited VPS needs I have. It always seems a lot more flexible and less expensive to have a single larger instance in which I can nest my own VMs and spin up as needed. Of course Docker might obviate the requirement for nestability, but I havent used Docker much, and have a certain comfort level with pre build VMs Ive created for various stock purposes.
Nested virt is coming... :-)
Which Linux distro do you recommend for running KVM? Additionally, SmartOS has good support for running KVM virtual machines [1]. It gives good solid stability and integration with ZFS, not sure of the performance though vs Linux. The main downside of SmartOS is somewhat sporadic hardware support (broadcom nic's out, intel nic's in). I prefer SmartOS now where I can, but knowing which Linux distro is useful especially for GPU support.
1: https://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and...
I recently moved my homelab to NixOS, since it lets me use the same system to manage the hosts and the guests declaratively.
I wrote up my approach at [1], in case you're curious.
1: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Virtualization_in_NixOS
This is great! Thanks! What an excellent use of NixOS.
Interesting approach! When/if you update a KVM instance, does it recreate it?
No, the contents of the instances are managed by a separate NixOps network, since it would be wasteful to send the full image (~1GB) for each instance each time a package is updated.
The purpose of the base image is to preinstall something that's ready for NixOps to "take over" with whatever I actually want to run on the VM.
I use KVM on Debian, but does it matter? KVM is distro agnostic.
The management tools are not.
The management tools along with the stability of the overall system. Debian might be a good choice for stability. Though it seems Redhat (maybe CentOS?) has a good lead on much of the KVM enterprise tools.
For home - https://www.proxmox.com/
Nice simple web GUI.
Nice article from someone who setup a home data lab with Proxmox [1]. Do you use the WebUI to manage ZFS datasets?
1: https://medium.com/@MARatsimbazafy/journey-to-deep-learning-...
Or just use VMWare. They have had a free edition forever, with less limitations year over year.
Until the changes announced in this blog post there were features in the free version of Xen that did not exist in the free version of ESXi (like live migration of hosts - without shared storage!)
as someone notes above, all Xen versions (including enterprise) are OSS so you can build and run them without paying for commercial support. the packages are just the supported, pre-built, “easy” path
VMWare has very little OSS, especially for their equivalents of Xen server. Id support KVM and co before VMWare just on those grounds alone
EDIT: clarity
The equivalent of Xen is ESX. It's been the gold standard for virtualization for a while and there is a free edition for as long as it existed.
Couldn't care less about open source. I'll prefer something that's free and works perfectly without hesitation.
You need dedicated supported hardware though.
oVirt 4.2 just came out and it looks great! (OpenSource of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization)
oVirt is great, but if you’re doing single node deployments in a homelab ESXi is my first recommendation. oVirt can’t put the only host available in a cluster in maintenance mode, just like vCenter - so it’s an exercise in frustration trying to update anything without it freaking out.
But if you’ve got multiple hosts oVirt is great.
For those who want a TL;DR, these are the features that are going to be removed from the free edition:
- Dynamic Memory Control
- Xen Storage Motion
- Active Directory Integration
- Role Based Access Control
- High Availability
- GPU Pass-Through
- Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery)
- XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
- Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted)
That's quite a list.
*from the free edition ISOs that they provide free of charge. The code is still there on github for anyone to build for themselves.
Which is not buildable "as is". Cf my other post here.
So we've got a company spending millions of dollars developing a piece of software, and then giving away all the source for free. And you think they should be forced to give you documentation on how to build it... why?
I mean, seriously the entitlement is astounding to me. OF COURSE they're going to make it difficult to build on your own, that's part of the monetization strategy. If you don't want to pay for it, and you also don't want to spend the time figuring out how to build it on your own, don't use it. But to act as if they owe you something is... ridiculous.
In the first place open source is a set of principals that is designed to inspire people to freely share with one another including the sweat of their brow in the form of direct contribution of work as opposed to cash.
Trying to make that sharing onerous is a violation of those principals and its not entitlement to point this out.
Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
So imagine it takes 1 person who is paid 120k a year a few weeks to produce a viable solution and documentation. The cost of this solution is about 2k and scales to infinity people.
In a universe where nobody communicates or collaborates I suppose you could imagine that everyone would pay 10k instead of paying 2k in labor for an officially supported solution perhaps in consideration for other value provided like tech support.
The problem is that this fails to consider the fact that someone might actually donate this labor for free to everyone negating the benefit of this particular moat.
It also creates a situation where someone might be inspired to put in the 2k worth of labor and charge 100 users $199 each and come out ahead.
Its certain that a number of players have earned money selling some sort of value add on top of open source software but the value add really needs to be something that you have a competitive advantage at providing not something trivial like a difficult build process.
You are defending nonsense.
>Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
Really? Because that's exactly what Redhat does and they've been continually held up as the shining example of "open source works!" for several decades now...
You buy support. Centos exists because building redhat from source isn't hard.
I'm looking at the feature matrix and free is missing "Automated Updates via XenCenter" but the way it's worded I don't know if it's a change or not. Right now XenCenter automatically alerts me of updates and lets me run them from XenCenter...
Xenserver in my experience at least the free edition is not as polished or stable as ESXi or even regular libvirt/KVM.
I experimented with the 7.2 Free edition and right from the installation not succeeding at first to many other things not working as expected it was not a very good experience. The management client UI is also Windows only I think and it's very sub par.
Given the new changes I wonder anyone would have any reason to run xenserver free edition. There's always ESXi, HyperV and good ole KVM (which maybe an issue if you run Windows server as a VM.)
I love ESXi. Simply rock solid.
Yep, all my rack servers run ESXi and except for the once in a blue moon patch I don't remember having to mess with them. And with the HTML5 UI starting to mature enough it's a sweet deal. My other choice is client HyperV from W10 on my workstations - too many updates but other than that pretty good to run supported VMs - suspend/resume to kill noise and domain joined machines mean headless management!
I agree; every day we stray further from the fundamentals. Xen, and to a lesser extent Docker, and other tools, do help beautify some of the underlying technologies and processes that may have come before them, but that does not make the usability sacrifice justified in situations like these.
I'm afraid I don't have a holistic answer, in this instance, that satisfies the requirement that the developers eat and be clothed, and that the users have an unimpeded work flow. Maybe it's a moral solution needed between all users, of all payment tiers, to agree not to abuse the intent of the permissive nature of the free-tier user agreement. It will be interesting seeing how this plays out.
I don't live in the windows world, so I'm curious - why is win on KVM an issue?
Windows server is an issue not the client SKUs. Reason is it requires Microsoft signed WHQL drivers so the Red Hat/ Fedora provided ones don't work.
Possibly licensing? Not sure though, I run my gaming VM at home with hardware passthrough and basically no issues (except fairly slow disk i/o, maybe that is the issue?). I think KVM is simply stronger when it comes to resource management with its VMs also running the linux kernel, it doesn't get as much freedom to balance load across your windows VMs.
EDIT: The correct answer was posted by blinkingled before I finished typing this up hahah, read their post instead of this one :)
David makes an important clarification in the comments:
"I think it's important to differentiate between the pricing of the product from Citrix, and the source code licensing model. XenServer (all editions) remains open source, with the ability for anyone to head over to Github and peruse the code, contribute patches, and so forth. What's changing is what features Citrix puts into the free edition that it builds, tests, and maintains; all of those are still open source, though."
What exactly would it mean to exclude features from an edition you provide the source for? Wouldn't anyone just be able to get a copy of the source and build the fully-featured edition anyways? How would these features even migrate - surely you could patch them back in to future version.
Right, that's the point. People who want it all for free and don't want to pay citrix anything are free to do so by compiling it from the source. This is 'unsupported' by citrix and you are free to do whatever you want.
The binaries as provided by citrix come in 3 editions. These changes apply to those editions. These are 'supported' by citrix.
Ok, but the problem is nobody seems to have the interest in recompiling it for the community (think CentOS).
A few months ago they started charging for patches and someone asked in the XenServer forums here:
https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/390349-open-source-fork...
When and how (frequently) do the security patches get folded into the source tree?
What license is the source distributed under? I think any licenses that are truly open source would allow anyone else to distribute binaries too, so people could get binaries from such a distribution rather than compile themselves.
I guess there might be a reason compiling to distribute binaries would be a time-consuming pain? (Or compiling yourself, for that matter).
Interesting to know - so you're paying for the support contract, but just indirectly?
Makes me wonder if that gives Citrix an interest in opposing deterministic binaries.
This is very disappointing to hear. I have actually migrated two nodes from proxmox to xenserver + xenorchestra not that long ago. I have no need for a full blown HA environment with dedicated NAS. I didn't have hardware capable of running proxmox on zfs + zfs-sync for a two node setup. Xenserver + xenorchestra (with its continious replication feature for backups) fit the bill much better than proxmox for this use case.
Companies that give away core technology for "Free" are always plagued with the perceptive one way door that gets created. There is never a good way out of the situation for either party. The company got the benefit of building a client base with low barrier to entry, but then struggles to maintain profitability after their support/ops burden increases. On the other side, the customer bases profitability and business model was hinged on their ability to innovate to reduce their margins, and now are forced to drastically alter their business plans.
The solution here is for citrix to roll back time, launch a new supported product, and then slowly close the faucet of new features going into the free product. They would have then created an opportunity to pitch the new innovations and migrate their existing customer base to the new platform. The only problem with this thinking (besides the time machine), are the competitors that are releasing more innovative products at the same "free" price point.
Companies, please learn from this: Anything given for free has no value until you try to take it away.
I have a project in the planning stages that needs gpu passthrough. What alternative should I use?
There are certainly more options, however from personal experience I can attest that ESXi’s free license supports GPU pass-through.
They generally don't support consumer GPU cards for passthrough however...