On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 02:06:50AM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote: > On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 11:51:51PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:57:57AM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote: > > > But we're beyond the age of this kind of symbiosis, Linux (or > > > GNU/Linux ...) and Fedora in particular doesn't need this anymore. > > > > The actual reality, real stuff in the real world, is that 90%+ of > > users of desktop computer systems run Windows, another 5%+ are running > > Mac OS X, and almost nobody (perhaps 10, 100 people in the whole > > world?) are running a completely free operating system (inc. BIOS > > etc). > > No one denies that, but don't we want to keep the fruits of F/LOSS to > encourage more F/LOSS usage? Hijacking F/LOSS solutions back to closed > source will not change the percentages above, on the contrary, you > remove some of the good reasons to go Linux. On the contrary - we are providing a viable migration path to Linux which does not currently exist, due to combined vendor lockin of VMWare & Windows. You can't switch one without the other & that's not something that it viable for people to do. Our motivation here is not to hijack or sabotage Fedora or F/LOSS, but to promote its use and expand the userbase of Fedora. Fedora provides an excellant platform for hosting virtual machines either with Xen or KVM. The libvirt API provides a vendor-independant managment API which helps users avoid vendor lockin to both the hypervisor, and their management tools that you see when using VMWare & other commercial virtalization projects. Fedora has been leading the entire open source distro field in its virtualization capabilities since Fedora Core 6, and feeds into many other distros - RHEL or course, but also Ubuntu , SUSE and Solaris are following our lead in management tools. The main competition is obviously VMWare and they have been dominant in all areas for years - every company which has a virtualization management product/application supports VMWare. We've slowly been trying to get these people to support libvirt, so that they can easily manage virtual machines hosted on Fedora. The sad reality is that most commercial management products use Windows as their base and so unless we can provide libvirt for Windows they'll not use it and thus not have any support for managing Fedora hosts, and just stick with VMWare. Having people ignore Fedora as a virtualization platform in favour of VMWare is not what anyone wants. Hence we want to provide the cross compiler toolchain in Fedora, so that we can build libvirt client & client tools for Windows. This will allow people with Windows desktops & management tools to make use of Fedora virtualization. This will increase the userbase of Fedora, and Linux based virtualization platforms. It will also fully establish libvirt as the primary cross-platform, vendor neutral management API for virtualzation. This is a huge step for F/LOSS over the total dominence of VMWare in this area. I can see further use cases where providing a MinGW toolchain will benefit Fedora and F/LOSS. The FreeIPA project is providing state of the art authentication & directory services based on F/LOSS in Fedora, to rival the dominence of propriety ActiveDirectory services. This is already a huge step forward in a homogeneous environment of Linux servers and Linux desktops. Unless they can also support Windows desktops as clients though, it will forever be a niche player in the authentication/directory services arena. This is not good for F/LOSS or Fedora. A MinGW toolchain will facilitate the support of Windows clients and directly benefit the uptake of Fedora and F/LOSS in this area. The current situation where people have to use VMWare for virt if they use Windows on the desktop does not provide an easy migration path to Fedora, because they have to replace both their management infrastructure and their desktop infrastructure at the same time. By providing a libvirt client enabled for Windows, we provide a viable migration path from a Windows world to a Fedora world. They can start off using Fedora for hosting their virtual machines, and as they discover the benefits of Fedora & F/LOSS they're more likely to also switch their desktop to Fedora. So far from hijacking / sabotaging Fedora's principles, we're re-inforcing the value of Fedora and what it stands for and introducing it to a group of user who have never had any option to use it in the past. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
