The Linux Foundation has taken over development of virtualization platform Xen from Citrix.

Xen is a virtualization offering that Citrix began sponsoring as a community project in 2007. The 10-year old platform is used by a variety of cloud service providers. At the Linux Foundation, Xen will be worked on collaboratively by firms such as Amazon, Intel, and AMD.

“Industry interest in Xen has been growing rapidly over the past few years, thriving on strong industry support and commitment from the project’s founding members,” said Citrix vice president of open source solutions Peder Ulander in a statement.

“By widening the scope of collaboration under The Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community can set the bar even higher for innovation. Citrix will remain committed to the project and advancing the technology for Xen Project-based products across the industry, including its own Citrix XenServer.”

Citrix had been looking to find a neutral community to lead development of Xen for the past year. For the last six years Citrix had been sponsoring the development of the open-source software.

By handing over responsibility of the software to the Linux Foundation, Citrix will be able to work on the product without leading its development. The Linux Foundation has a large base of community developers that work together to build out open-source technologies.

Xen is a hypervisor platform that allows multiple computer systems to work off the same computer hardware at the same time. The cloud offering is used by products such as RackSpace’s public cloud and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

Following the news, the Linux Foundation will handle development for both Xen and KVM virtualization tools. According to the foundation, being able to advance both platforms will help promote its open-source philosophy.

“Virtualization is important to Linux and the open source community and both Xen and KVM are widely accepted by users and developers. The advancement of both benefits developers, users and vendors,” wrote Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin in a blog post.

“The open source model is predicated upon freedom of choice, so supporting a range of open source virtualization platforms and facilitating collaboration across open source communities is a priority for The Linux Foundation.”

Last year, Citrix made a similar move when it donated CloudStack to the Apache Foundation. The cloud service provider gave CloudStack to the foundation last April.