At OSBC 2008, I met with people who are running the Open Source Census Project which is an attempt to collect all the data on which open source technology is being used in the Enterprise. I think this is a great idea and that Xen.org should make sure that we have the proper data in their tool to account for Xen hypervisor installations. You can read more on this project at http://www.osscensus.org/ and I am hoping that the community adds the proper information to their tool which can be found at http://ossdiscovery.opensource.collab.net/. If you work on this project, please add comments below so everyone knows the status.
As for timing, the project intends to start in April of 2008 so timing is critical that we add information for the Xen hypervisor.
I did research on the fingerprint identifier and found the following:
* Full document at http://ossdiscovery.opensource.collab.net/archives/docs/WritingProjectRules.pdf
4 types of identification available
1) MD5 checksum match – “MD5”
2) Binary content match – “binary”
3) Filename version match (ant-1.6.5.jar indicates 1.6.5 of Ant) – “filenameVersion”
4) Filename only match (no version can be derived) – “filename”
Anyone with knowledge of what is installed on a Xen hypervisor can easily create a rule.