Disappointment over virtualization techs mounts. This time, Oracle takes its shots

Barely a day has passed since Red Hat went public with its nasty-gram that XenSource's Xen virtualization technology isn't ready enough for primetime (or, at least for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux) and now, Oracle is bitchin' and complainin' too.  According to eWeek's Peter Galli:

Oracle is fast losing its patience with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together to help develop a single interface that will integrate a variety of virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel...."We certainly believe in one simple universal way to integrate a variety of virtualization solutions, and that is the way that Andrew Morton [the maintainer of the stable Linux kernel] wants to go," said Bob Shimp, the vice president of Oracle's technology business unit, on July 31...."I can say that Oracle is losing its patience over this issue and we are going to be pushing harder and harder on everybody to come to the table with a realistic solution," he said, noting that it is in everyone's interest to get a solution thrashed out that benefits the open-source community as a whole.

Earlier this year, things in the virtualization market heated up when Microsoft decided it was going to start giving away its virtualization technologies.  In response, VMware decided to release its hypervisor technology (known as VMDK) to the market for free, without a license requirement (not exactly open source, but perhaps the next best thing).  But XenSource was already in the market with an open source hypervisor that, notwithstanding it's enterprise readiness, has been getting a lot of support from a lot of vendors like Intel and AMD.  In some ways, it was too bad that VMware hadn't thought of the giveaway strategy a long time ago.  There might be one hypervisor in the market (instead of 4 or 5) and Oracle's Shimp might not be all in a huff. 

Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.