I am European, but I am sick of reading claims like this one in Slashdot and elsewere. It makes no sense to pretend that we are better than the Americans, or that our laws are more fair or that our politicians are better. In most areas we are almost as bad as the states (and copyright is one of them), while in other areas we are even worse.

And we both (Americans and Europeans) are seeing our laws changing continuously for the worse, and we will end up with a very similar set of laws in the end: those that are good for the people in power (i.e.: the corporations).

You think "the spirit of the law" counts for something in Europe? Do you trust those currently in power in your country to uphold it? Do you think the European Comission cares about "the spirit" of anything?

They disgust me as an European, too.

Thousands of experts would have assured you that pholgiston and the ether existed. The consensus view in medicine has been wrong lots of times: routine tonsilectomy, eggs and other foods as contributing to high cholesterol, the effects of tobacco and alcohol [...]

And how do you know all those things were wrong? Guess what, the consensus told you. So your best strategy is to always follow the consensus, unless you want to invest a decade or so becoming an expert yourself. If you want someone with an immutable and infallible truth, ask a priest or an astrologist.

If xenserver had better resource management then I think vmware would be on its way out of my lab.

Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).

So if you are not into some performance-fiendish-disk-io-and-cpu situations (at which point you shouldn't be really virtualizing these porkers anyway) then KVM + HA-NAS might be the trick. KVM is also capable of reading vmdk files so you can cheat using the VMWare Converter just like you would with ESX hosts, just make sure not to install VMWare tools during conversion...

Search the net, people are doing wacky things with KVM already and soon the commercial guys will be fighting an uphill battle ... which is all for the better, IMHO.

Sounds familiar.