[Xen-devel] Xen is now a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxx>]

Dear community members,

almost a year ago, I floated the idea within Citrix of finding a 
non-profit home for the Xen Project. At this point, I had worked for and 
with the Xen community for just over a year. We only just implemented 
community-led Governance and it was clear that at some point Xen would 
need to become a truly vendor neutral project. You cannot imagine how 
pleased I was, when almost immediately I got full support from Citrix 
management to pursue the idea of finding a vendor-neutral home for Xen. 
We looked at various options and it quickly became clear that The Linux 
Foundation was the most natural fit for the Xen Project. And then the 
hard work to pull everything together started … but this is a story for 
some other time. The good news is that as of today, The Xen Project is a 
Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with an impressive Advisory Board 
consisting of companies that will contribute to, fund and guide the 
non-technical aspects of the Xen Project.
An increase in Diversity
========================
Let’s have a quick recap of Xen Governance Evolution: in early 2011, the 
developer community largely operated through a set of unwritten rules. 
This made it hard to join the community. In retrospect this had actually 
stopped vendors from contributing and was the reason why some early 
contributors abandoned Xen. Since then, we defined ourXen Governance 
formalizing values, roles, decision making, the project life-cycle and 
other areas. Ownership and responsibilities of tasks have been 
distributed to community members. We also created a forum for 
distinguished community members (individuals as well as vendors 
contributing to the project) through the Xen Maintainer, Committer and 
Developer Meetings, which have evolved into a Project Management 
Committee (even though we don’t call it a PMC). Also, we have a better 
approach to planning and generating a Xen Roadmap, a well-defined 
Security Vulnerability Process and other community initiatives. The 
effect all this had is that the contributor community grew from 6 
organizations contributing more than 1% to the code in 2010 to 13 
organizations in 2012. The next logical step for Xen was to become a 
truly independent open source project, and this has now happened.
Bringing Users and Developers Together
======================================
One thing I am really pleased with is the diverse list of companies that 
joined the Xen Advisory Board to support the project financially.
* Hardware and Silicon vendors such as AMD, Calxeda, Cisco, Intel and 
Samsung.
* Companies that use Xen in software products such as Bromium, Citrix 
and Oracle.
* Large scale users of Xen, such as Amazon Web Services, CA 
Technologies, Google and Verizon.
This is a good and healthy mix. Because of Xen’s roots as a University 
project, it was an almost exclusively developer-focused community. Some 
even complained that the project didn’t care a lot about its users. But 
for open source projects to succeed, tending and growing your user base 
is essential. In the last two years, the community started a program of 
change and has engaged its user base much more. Having good user 
representation on the Xen Advisory Board should help foster and 
accelerate this change. The icing on the cake is the new xenproject.org 
site (which we are launching as beta today) is designed to be a site for 
the entire community: bringing users, developers as well as companies 
together.
More Collaboration
==================
For the Xen 4.3 release we have already seen an increased amount of 
collaboration and up-front planning on issues such as performance and 
scalability improvements, new features such as PVH and Xen ARM support 
for ARM based servers, UEFI secure boot, working with upstream projects 
such as Linux and QEMU, downstream Linux and BSD distros and cloud 
orchestration stacks. Embedding Xen into the Linux family as a Linux 
Foundation Collaborative project should lead to more such collaboration 
as part of the wider Linux and open source community. Of course this 
will not happen by itself: one of my personal priorities for the rest of 
this year is that more collaboration happens.
What is going to change?
========================
If you are a Xen User or Developer pretty much nothing initially. 
Everything will continue to run as it always has. In the longer run, I 
am confident that the Xen Collaborative Project will lead to more code 
contributions, better integration with Linux distributions, increased 
adoption of Xen, more integration with other projects, better marketing 
and a lot more. All the changes should be positive.
There will be some short-term changes though that will affect you: 
xen.org will move to xenproject.org, the Xen Logo is changing and we 
have a new Xen Community website at xenproject.org (which means the old 
site will be archived). Because the domain changes cannot be implemented 
entirely without impacting our users and developers, this may be also a 
good opportunity to look at some housekeeping activites (wiki 
categorization to improve navigation, killing some old archived lists, 
... ). Any changes will be made with the community in accordance with 
existing community processes. Unfortunately we could not involve you 
when we prepared the new xenproject.org community website: I hope you 
understand that we had to keep the creation of the Xen Linux Foundation 
Collaborative Project under wraps. But there will be plenty of 
opportunity to listen to you and make changes in the coming weeks.
In any case, I am quite excited about what is happening and I hope you 
are too.
Lars

Further Information
===================
- Announcement : 
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2013/04/xen-become-linux-foundation-collaborative-project
- New Xen Prpject Community Web-site : http://www.xenproject.org
- FAQ : http://www.xenproject.org/xen-project-faq.html


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