Citrix acquisition leads to Xen-o-phobia

Preinstalls can be a very powerful -- albeit sometimes anticompetitive -- weapon, as Microsoft's 'chokehold' on OEMs has already taught us (Microsoft's retaliation threats against OEMs aside). Without separability, there will be not much choice.

We have highlighted by now the role of Citrix in grabbing a competitive threat to Microsoft. Xen seems to have been hijacked after the typical dance that is intended to marginalise GNU/Linux^**. Rumours or speculations that Microsoft might buy Xen (Citrix) are not so far-fetched anymore and the following headline might be a sign of things to come:

Citrix says Xen to be preinstalled on servers

A senior executive with Citrix Systems Inc said on Wednesday that the business software maker expects to announce agreements to preinstall its Xen software on machines made by some of the world's biggest makers of server computers .

"There are announcements coming," Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of the virtualization and management division of Citrix said in an interview.

Remember the increasing tightening between Microsoft's virtualisation strategy and Xen. This was made more concrete in an announcement about two weeks ago.

The considerable danger is that, instead of whiteboxes, people who wish to have GNU/Linux servers will get Novell+Xen^***, or even a Windows host with Linux as a slave (guest). Some people who do not know better can be lured in by this. By all means remember that Ron Hovsepian foresaw Novell's SUSE (SLES) running under Windows when he approached Microsoft. Being a vassal was his miserable choice. ⬆

____ ^** Apache is probably protected because it's a foundation, but Microsoft recently invited them to Redmond for some good time.

^*** Speaking of Novell, OpenSUSE isn't really the problem at all. The concern is that by helping OpenSUSE, one is also lifting SLED/SLES, from which Microsoft extracts revenue for its extortions.