I was wondering whether or not XenServer is truly open source. The project has seen quite some back and forth in its history. It was first released in 2006 as a proprietary extension of the Xen hypervisor, called XenEnterprise, by XenSource Inc. Later it became XenServer released by Citrix, still being a proprietary extension of the Xen hypervisor, until Citrix open-sourced it in 2013 and shifted it's business model towards XenServer support. But the information available is confusing.On the one hand, there is this announcement by Citrix, sayingXenServer 6.2 is now fully open source!and this slideshow by two Citrix employees which contains some graphics that show everything is open source now.On the other hand, there is the this XenServer developers page, which says thatthere are a small number of XenServer components which are not able to be open sourced.These components include the Citrix license server daemon and various system drivers and user tools.For me, open source always meant, that you can download and recompile 100% of the source code on your own and don't have any forced linkage to proprietary software. Is this a misconception of mine? How can this project, that is such strongly interwoven with commercial mixed/closed-source components, be called fully open source? Where is the statutory border in calling something fully open source?
Can XenServer really be treated as open source software?
licensing;commercial