The drama continues; I shall have to hawk this around my colleagues because it doesn’t seem to me to square with what I’ve been told…

blogs.xensource.com

I can categorically state that Grandinetti’s statement is an outright fabrication and utter nonsense. XenSource has never made such an announcement, and would never do so. In my view this sort of PR stunt does Virtual Iron and its investors a huge disfavor. Though I hate to give them more press than they deserve, I wanted to set the facts straight.

XenSource is the legal owner of the Xen(tm) trademark. Xen is a code base for a freely available, industry standard hypervisor that is licensed under GPL and developed collaboratively by a community of contributors using the open source model. It represents a huge investment not only on the part of XenSource, but also on the part of (to name but a few) Intel, AMD, IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Novell, VA Linux, NEC, Sun, Fujitsu-Siemens, Egenera, Stratus, NVIDIA, Emulex, Qlogic, Bull, rPath, Cisco and all of the 50+ ISVs in our ecosystem that rely on a consistent implementation of the features and APIs of the hypervisor for their products to work. Combined, this community invests tens of millions of dollars per year into the development of the Xen hypervisor and value-added products.

Naturally, since Xen is delivered to market by many vendors, many of them want to state that their product includes Xen. That way, they get to benefit from the brand awareness and customer preference that has arisen from the tremendous following associated with the Xen project. The XenSource trademark policy for the Xen brand was designed to allow any vendor that faithfully implements the Xen hypervisor to qualify, free of charge, to use of the ‘includes Xen’ logo on its products, and to state textually that their product includes Xen. XenSource is no different than any other vendor in this regard. Our products faithfully implement Xen, and so we can say that they include Xen. The policy was designed to foster a strong ecosystem of vendors around Xen, and was modelled after the successful trademark policy created by MySQL, which also has an ‘includes MySQL’ program. The Mozilla Foundation, home of the Firefox browser, also uses its marks to ensure the quality of implementation of its products. So, what vendors faithfully implement the Xen hypervisor? Red Hat, Novell, Sun – all significant contributors to Xen, as well as Xandros, Ubuntu, Mandriva and many other Distros. And of course, nobody has to call their hypervisor Xen – they can call it whatever they like.

(…)

…etc; so in theory Sun (et al) can refer to Xen, as Xen, without fear.

Excuse me, I just need to go chat with some people who apparently believe otherwise, no doubt confused by all this FUD.

(Oh, and just whilst I am here, regarding the last sentence of the quote above: if Xen is meant to be a big thing, who in their right mind would want to call their hypervisor anything else? RedHat doesn’t rebrand their kernel as Redlix or something, they use Linux like anyone else.)