Xen project Mailing List

On 12 Feb 2012, at 13:36, msgbox450@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

This looks nice although I am not really sure I understand the angle you're coming from here...

You're announcing a GUI, but the site is just a wiki with text and a bit of bashing vmware and windows but no screenshots of nice GUI designs or explanations of how yours will be better…

I should've noted that this was merely an announcement to let everyone know we're alive and to give it a shot, we're not even close to a 1.0 release. However your point is valid and we've added it on our TODO list.

In my view, XAPI already has a decent Windows GUI in the form of XenCenter, the bit we're missing is a really good cross-platform and fully open gui base. Java isn't a great choice for that due to the anti-java feelings around the community and GPL is also not a great choice given its viral nature.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of the GPL in your wiki too when you say "the GPLv3 requires that everyone who improves our project, makes his work available publicly". It doesn't - not if people just use it in house. People can make their own improvements all they like without releasing it.

What the GPL actually means for anyone who wants to make a rebranded release of it for their clients or customers though, is that they will have to maintain a full archive of all the source going back all the versions, including all their little service-specific tweaks and then make it readily available to whoever wants it on request.

Thanks for pointing that out.

In my view that just adds a lot of extra work and security considerations to any project that wants to use it. It also means no-one can add anything clever with it that gives them a competitive edge without releasing the source, so in that case they'll probably choose to build a GUI from scratch rather than contribute anything.

Here's the thing: we don't want people to not release the source. This might make sense from a money perspective, but we're true believers in the open source way. You can be competitive as a service provider on many other levels; after all, we're just one piece of the machine. Our main ambition is to make this a single implementation that is the best anyone can get, instead of some scattered implementations only to give a competitive edge.

If we want a free, uncustomised proprietary windows GUI like VSphere Client then XenCenter does a great job. If we want a fully open, cross platform GUI that we can rebrand and customised for our own service offerings then we should be looking at something AJAX based with a BSD/MIT style license.

The rebranding part sounds rather odd to me: you could stick another logo on top, sure, but we want to know about people's customizations. At this moment we're happy we can boot an HVM domain but in the long term we'd like to see this grow to being the best (FOSS) management tool for XCP.

To achieve that goal we need every contribution we can get (especially from those running this in production). This way the GPL makes a bit more sense, as you said people need to maintain their modifications on file, so they might just as well be good open source citizens and contribute them.

Just my 10 cents ;)

Appreciated,

PS: I didn't CC xen-users, I don't want to crosspost too much.

On 11 February 2012 19:14, Wannes De Smet <wannes321@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We're happy to announce XenMaster, which has the ambitious goal to become the de facto frontend for Xen with XCP.

We've had the opportunity to present our project to some of the Xen/XCP developers and now it's time to announce the project to a larger public.
XenMaster, in short, is a HTML5 frontend coupled to a Java backend delivering a rich UI for Xen, targeted at end users.
At the moment, one is able to successfully add NFS ISO repositories and iSCSI/NFS storage repositories (iSCSI currently only works on XenServer 5.6), create a HVM VM and control it via a VNC shell.

Development thus far has been carried out by Jorgen Evens, frontend lead and Wannes De Smet, project lead and backend developer. Of course, we now would like to welcome you in becoming a tester and/or contributor!
You can find more information at xen-master.org, to install and configure XenMaster. If you'd like to help and have experience in developing Java and/or _javascript_, load the source in your favorite IDE and have at it!

If you have any questions at all, we'll be happy to answer them here or through GitHub.

We hope to welcome you in using XenMaster!
Jorgen Evens
Wannes De Smet
XenMaster

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Re: [Xen-API] Announcing XenMaster