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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.