Parallels CEO backs down

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, has now clarified his position on open source. In a brief memo to the open source community, he says "In a recent interview I jokingly tried to buck the trend of common perception and play devil’s advocate regarding open source and the community".

"I want to be clear that my comments were not meant to be taken in any way seriously and I apologise to any of the community offended by my remarks," he continued, "The reality is that we have long been one of the largest contributors and supporters of open source projects. In fact, we are the ninth largest contributor contributor to the development of the Linux kernel, and through our Cloud services provider and hosting partners we support one of the largest open source ecosystems in the industry". Beloussov noted that Parallels own strategy relied "significantly" on open source platforms and asked the community to "judge me and the company by our actions which really speak for themselves."

In a recent interview with German magazine T3n, the Parallels CEO originally described open source as "A huge pile of shit". He also said that he believes that pure open source projects aren't able to deliver a high-quality, fast and well coordinated product, and that this is why Linux faces a "great challenge". Other topics of the interview included Microsoft's cloud initiative and competing Linux virtualisation solutions, KVM and Xen.

Parallels produces virtualisation software and is the driving force behind OpenVZ, the open source basis for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers.

See also:

• Parallels CEO complains about open source, a report from The H.

(crve)