The LXD Project Finds a New Home at Canonical (UPDATED)

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Jul 05, 2023,
updated Jul 09, 2023

Canonical has taken complete control of the LXD project and will now manage everything related to it.

Even though they have been involved since the inception of LXD, they have now decided to take a more direct approach.

Many organizations seem to be tightening their grip on open-source projects. Even Red Hat did something similar recently.

Read on

Linuxiac:

• LXD Containers Project Goes under Canonical’s Wing

  In recent years, using containers has revolutionized the whole software industry’s approach to building software. Nowadays, technologies like Docker and Podman have become the industry standard.

  However, the ability to run Linux containers using LXC/LXD has been supported as a core feature of Linux since 2008.

Here's some more:

• Ubuntu publisher Canonical to assume control of LXD

  The LXD project, an open-source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC), is to be brought under the umbrella of Canonical’s own projects.

  The decision by Canonical, the creator and main contributor to the project, comes after LXD had spent more than eight years as part of the LXC community.

  LXC said its team “regrets” the situation but respects Canonical’s decision to bring it under its own watch. The transition period is now underway.

  Canonical did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

• LXD moves into Canonical

  Canonical, the creator and main contributor of the LXD project has decided that after over 8 years as part of the Linux Containers community, the project would now be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects.

  While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.

• Canonical Take Control of LXD (But Say It Won’t Be Snap-Only)

  A short statement posted on the Linux Containers website states: “The LXD project is no longer part of the LinuxContainers project but can now be found directly on Canonical’s websites.”

  Although Canonical created LXD and has been a key contributor to its development the project has thus far lived under the auspices of the Linux Containers community. That’s changing as Canonical now feels the project will “be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects”.

• Canonical Removes LXD From Linuxcontainers.org’s Care

  Canonical’s taken LXD back. The company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has decided that the project it created, and to which it is the largest contributer, will “be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects,” according to a notice posted by linuxcontainers.org, the organization that’s hosted the project for the past eight years.

  Linux Containers is the umbrella project behind LXC, the popular Linux container runtime that consists of tools, templates, and library and language bindings. Users like it because of its flexibility, and because it covers almost all features supported by the Linux kernel.

  In addition, the organization hosts a variety of other software projects related to LXC, such as LXCFS (a userspace filesystem), distrobuilder (an image building tool for containers and virtual machines), libresource (a library of interfaces for obtaining system resource information), and lxcri (an LXC wrapper that’s used as a drop-in container runtime replacement).

UPDATE

Late coverage:

• Canonical takes its LXD 'containervisor' back into the house

  Canonical's LXD tool, previously maintained in public under the auspices of the Canonical-sponsored Linux Containers project, is being taken in-house.

  On US Independence Day, Canonical announced that the LXD project it sponsors is, um, no longer independent. Previously, development of the LXD project had been carried out as part of the wider Linux Containers project. The Ubuntu Discourse has an FAQ post with a little more information, but still not very much.

  LXD has been around for quite a while now: The Reg covered its announcement back in 2014, and the inclusion of the first release in Ubuntu 15.10 the following year. LXC is rather older: we first mentioned it as an up-and-coming option in 2011, a couple of years before Docker first launched.