- Winning with the family
- Why Fake Steve Jobs is worth reading
- Is "the community" hurting the OSS business model?
- Marc Fleury's next project?
- SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards
- Questioning Josh Berkus on how to encourage a community
- Java One: diversity and freedom
- Borland sells CodeGear to Embarcadero for $23 million
- Josh Berkus on how to destroy a community
- Ever wanted to create a Blu-ray disc?
May 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Last week I learned that Sun has put its 3 database groups (Java DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL) under Marten Mickos. First off, who knew Sun had such a broad database portfolio???? Second, smart move putting them all under Marten.
In speaking with Marten's Java DB team I gave them a small nugget of advice that has served us incredibly well with WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE). Simply put win with the strengths of the family, not individual products.
I've written about customers wanting choice and flexibility and the challenges of trying to position any product, OSS or not, as the answer to every problem. As a result, we've shifted from competing with WAS CE by itself to competing with WAS CE as an integral member of the WebSphere family of app servers. The results speak for themselves. Today, some customers use WAS CE alone, and others use WAS CE and then move up to the broader WebSphere app server family. A growing number are using WAS CE and the broader WebSphere app server family together to achieve different things within the same project. By bringing the family to the table we are able to win deals that start with either WAS CE or any member of the WebSphere app server family.
Sun has a similar opportunity. If the customer wants an embeddable Java database, Sun has Java DB. If the customer is looking for a really easy to use database for web-based CRUD apps, Sun has MySQL. If the customer is looking for a higher-end database or looking to replace some Oracle instances, Sun has PostgreSQL. Positioning the three options to go after three different usage situations will help reduce confusion. It also prevents a "one size fits all" mentality, which customers rarely subscribe to. The challenge for Marten and team is to tie the family message together by making it easier to use all three databases together in a larger application/project. This will be a critical step to ensuring that a MySQL customer can also be sold Java DB etc. Common tooling (to the degree possible) will go a long way towards making the family story a reality.
Good luck guys. Win with the family.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on May 15, 2008 10:24 AM
May 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Why Fake Steve Jobs is worth reading
Every now and then I wander over to Fake Steve Jobs blog. If you haven't you should take a look some time. Whether you think his caricature of Steve Jobs as a tyrianical artiste is funny or not, you may be surprised by the insightful commentary.
Personally, I think FSJ is a pretty good satire, but I wouldn't keep reading it if it weren't for how sharp Dan is. As a Forbes Senior Editor, I think Dan can't help analyzing the IT industry even if he occasionally throws in some humor.
Recently, FSJ did a great analysis of Dell countering an article by Charlie Cooper from CNet and giving his perspective on why they will not bounce back any time soon.
What people overlook is that the advantages that allowed Dell to prosper for about a decade were all fleeting advantages. Dell was for a while an innovative company, but its innovations did not involve product design. They involved manufacturing and distribution efficiencies.
On the distribution side, Dell sidestepped the cumbersome and costly two-tier (or is it three-tier) distribution model that its PC rivals had allowed to grow up around them like kudzu until it was choking them and consuming a huge chunk of their profits... Game-changer here was the Internet which made it easy for anyone to set up their own Web store and build direct relationships with customers. Dell's advantage got erased.
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other... What wiped this one out was a little place called China. Have you heard of it? The rise of China means everyone can make PCs pretty much as cheaply as Dell does.
FSJ goes on to point out that the most significant innovations are those that are about product ideas and product design.
To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.
In that regard, even Open Source's cost advantage is also fleeting. Once you've got umpteen different open source solutions all vying for the user, price alone will not convey a long term advantage. You need to understand what is unique and compelling about your product. What advantages does your product have over the competition? Low price can get you in the door, but price alone will not keep your produt in production. It's still a competitive market.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 15, 2008 07:01 AM
May 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Is "the community" hurting the OSS business model?
I had an interesting discussion with Marten Mickos at JavaOne last week that I've been meaning to blog about.
I was disappointed that MySQL decided to put encryption and compression backup into MySQL Server (GPL license), versus including those features only in MySQL Enterprise (commercial license). Most of you will recall the outrage from "the community" that began when MySQL considered adding these enterprisey features only inside of MySQL Enterprise.
I wanted to discuss this situation with Marten.
I do not believe that Support and/or Monitoring around an OSS product are viable long term value propositions that will convince users to become, and stay, buyers. This has more to do with human nature than OSS leaders have yet acknowledged. Sure you'll get some portion of your users to pay for Support etc., (which I call Category "C" users). But good luck growing beyond that group.
I know that Simon will disagree. During his JavaOne pitch, Simon mentioned that Sun is benefiting from a large number of adoption-led deals. However, I've spoken to many customers who are saying "we bought support for 2 years and realized we just didn't use it as much as we thought. Also, with the source code being available, my software developers can support our use of product XYZ internally". It could be that Simon is seeing Category "C" users still and will sing a different tune when trying to convert Category "B" users.
I'd suggest that the MySQL decision described above highlights challenges of trying to grow an OSS business faster than the rate of customer conversion from Category "C" users.
The solution I favor is to sell products that can't be obtained in any way but through payment. MySQL was walking down this path before "the community" had its say.
Marten reassured me that MySQL may yet decide to add features only inside of MySQL Enterprise (and not in the open source MySQL Server) in the future. I fear that MySQL will be faced with the same outrage from "the community" if and when they try to make this change. This will help proprietary vendors maintain the feature/function gap vs. OSS vendors. Recall that for the majority of single-vendor backed OSS products, there is virtually no cost savings vs. developing closed-source software. To close the feature/function gap, OSS vendors need faster revenue growth to fund this development expense.
The OSS vendor community needs leaders who will stand up to "the community" and make the tough business decisions needed to ensure that OSS isn't relegated to a small revenue slice of the software industry pie.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on May 14, 2008 12:11 PM
May 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss and former open source bad boy posted an intriguing update saying he's hanging out with Digium co-founder Mark Spencer, who is now CTO. Who knows what they're up to, but I have a sense it's more than just ATV riding. When I last met Mark at the Open Source Goat Rodeo he said he was completely done and had no interest in getting back into business again. And then he immediately described an interesting project he was working on. So who knows. In Marc's own words, he says he's too smart to try it again. But I also think Marc's too young to stay retired. Plus we need some more colorful personalities in the industry.
Let the guessing begin...
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 12, 2008 01:24 PM
May 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards
SourceForge.net is opening up its awards program to all open source projects this year for the first time (vs. only projects at SourceForge.net).
The open nominations period runs until the middle of June. Finalists will be announced and voting will commence. The awards party will be OSCON in Portland, July 24th.
Categories include:
- Best Project overall
- Best New Project
- Best Project for the Enterprise
- Best Project for Gamers
- Best Technical Design
- Best User Support
Get involved and nominate the projects you want to see recognized!
PS: Kudos to Microsoft for being the "Diamond Partner" for the program.
PPS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on May 12, 2008 05:55 AM
May 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Questioning Josh Berkus on how to encourage a community
Like Zack, I too enjoyed Josh Berkus' tongue in cheek session on how to destroy a community. Josh provided an anti-list for those who would like to encourage a community as follows:
- Familiar tools
- Discourage poisonous people
- Document everything
- Accessible online meetings
- Minimize legalese
- Expert liaison
- Governance simplification
- Treat licenses with respect
- Promote outside committer
- Communicate
(Source: Josh Berkus as best as I can remember his list from my chicken scratch notes - Used under Creative Commons License)
However, I'd like to respectfully disagree with Josh's patent-pending list.
I'll going to go out on a limb and suggest that Josh's presentation, while amusing and interesting, is not as relevant to the OSS movement as we'd like to think. OSS projects of much lore began as truly open multi-vendor / multi-third-party efforts. This was true of kernel.org, many (but not all) Apache projects, and many (but not all) Eclipse projects. But today, the name of the OSS game is 180 degrees opposite from multi-vendor efforts.
If you're a startup attempting to build an OSS-based business, you will likely ignore #4, #5, #7 and especially #9. If you don't want to ignore these steps, rest assured that your VC will "encourage" you to do so. You can ignore these steps because they have minimal impact on your ability to grow a successful OSS business or successful OSS community. You don't want a multi-vendor project; you want a community of users who congregate around a code base that you control. Don't believe me? Classify vendors like MySQL, SugarCRM, Zimbra, JBoss (not Red Hat - their business is based around a multi-vendor project), Alfresco, SpringSource, Hyperic, etc. against steps #4, #5, #7 and #9.
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that OSS success hinges on the same things that were required when the breadth of multi-vendor and/or third-party participation was the key criteria for a "successful" OSS project.
Like it or not, OSS success is beginning to be measured along the same metric that society (rightly or wrongly) measures success...how much money you can make...and making money starts with power/control (of the project).
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on May 9, 2008 10:40 AM
May 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Java One: diversity and freedom
While this was by no means my first Java One conference, I had not attended in the last four years. Just as the market has changed, so has Java One. Two observations struck me about the conference: it's more diverse than ever and secondly, there's a lot more emphasis on freedom.
In terms of diversity, Java One has now become much more interesting to programmers using a wider variety of languages. In the past, Sun had been critical of scripting languages, missing out on much of the growth of web application development. That's changed with the broad availability of languages now supported by the JVM. There are now more than 200 different languages implemented on the JVM, including the likes of JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Scala and about 195 others. (Ok, clearly grad students have too much time on their hands.) Most importantly, Sun is taking seriously that there are different ways to skin a cat. The diversity is also seen in the fact that there are different areas of focus for Java, ranging from Java Enterprise Edition for backend servers to Java ME (Micro Edition) for mobile devices, Java FX for user-interface development, and so on. (I had to laugh when one of the developers came on stage to demo something called LWUIT. Who comes up with these names?)
Sun also put a lot of empahsis on freedom this year. This is no surprise since CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been talking about the freedom open source provides, a key tenet of Sun's overall strategy. Rich Green made a good point in his keynote talking about the importance making sure that your data doesn't become locked into proprietary systems. In fact, you could argue that going forward the data becomes more valuable.
If you weren't at the conference you can view the keynotes online at Sun's site. And I've posted some photos on PicasaWeb from Community One and Java One.
I've also embedded a link to an excerpt from the keynote featuring Rich Green, Jonathan Schwartz and legendary rocker Neil Young, talking about using Java to develop his 5 volume Blu-ray DVD archive collection. Heck, Neil's a pretty good example of both diversity and freedom! Things are definitely rockin' in the free world.
(The video is quite long, so feel free to skip ahead to around 4:40 if you want to see Neil Young.)
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 9, 2008 07:11 AM
May 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Borland sells CodeGear to Embarcadero for $23 million
After more than two years, Borland has finally sold its CodeGear division to Embarcadero a database tools company for a mere $23 million. It's a sad ending to one of the great software companies of the 1980s and 1990s. And it shows just how badly a company can suffer when it misses out on major shifts in technology or business.
Borland's developer tools, including Delphi, JBuilder and C++ defined the state of the art Integrated Development Environment (IDE) since the company's early days with Turbo Pascal. OK, maybe I am being sentimental; I worked at Borland in the 1990s and helped introduce products like Delphi and JBuilder that contributed billions of dollars in revenue.
Unfortunately, Borland badly stumbled in direct competition against Microsoft's Office suite and later missed out on the seismic shift to Web-based development and open source tools like Eclipse and NetBeans. When Eclipse 1.0 launched it was only a matter of time when the open source tools would become "good enough" and developer adoption would shift away from commercial tools.
At its peak, I'm sure the Borland tools division was worth 50 or more times yesterday's sale price. But once a business gets disrupted by technology or market change, the effects can be devastating. It's not the first time it's happened and I'm sure it won't be the last.
Borland continues on in name, but the company is now focused on more high-end Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products for corporate IT.
Frankly, I don't know how Borland's management teamcan justify a firesale price like this --less than half of 2007's revenues --but for Embarcadero it's a bargain. And hopefully it's a good outcome for customers and for Borland's development staff. There's still a huge installed base for Delphi and I am amazed at how many people I run into who used it for Windows development in the 1990s.
What do others think? Can Delphi and JBuilder make it in the new online world? What do you think of Embarcadero's strategy?
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 8, 2008 12:55 PM
May 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Josh Berkus on how to destroy a community
It's been interesting to see a large number of non-technical open source presentations at Java One this year. It's a sign that indicates that not only has Sun embraced open source, but they are also attracting a new audience that is interested in open source. It's not quite OSCON, but it's definitely a more diverse audience than just a few years ago.
Josh Berkus, Sun Community guy, gave a tongue in cheek discussion about how to destroy your community. He made the point that many companies that start to adopt open source like the licensing model and the distribution mechanism, but don't know quite how to deal with community. It's something that many companies are not used to and they wonder if there's a way to not have to deal with this ever-demanding group. So to meet that challenge, Josh defined his own ten-step patent-pending (and don't think he won't sue you) method for destroying a community.
1. Difficult tools
Such as weird or obscure build tools, CMS systems, issue trackers, etc.
2. Encourage poisonous people
Argue at length with trolls, then denounce them and kick them off the project. Eventually it will drive everyone off the project.
3. No documentation
Don't document the code, it just clutters up the code! Or change things as soon as you document them.
4. Closed door meetings
Schedule meetings on short notice or only with your company staff. That way you will drive out any outside participants.
5. Lots of legalese
Make complex contributor agreements, web content licensing, and non-disclosure agreements. That will inhibit people from contributing.
6. Bad liaison
Make someone reclusive, too busy, with no authority or mismatched technical skills to do the job. That way they won't get it done right and will probably manage to piss-off everyone. Maybe if you're lucky they'll become a poisonous person.
7. Governance obfuscation
Make a complicated committee structure, perhaps borrowing from the UN, to have a structure that no one understands. Make decision making complex and lengthy so know one can understand it.
8. Screw around with the license
Even just threatening to change the license can drive people crazy.
9. No outside contributors
Don't make it clear how outsiders would be able to contribute code or become a committer. For example, you can use a catch-22 rule that the only people who can be committers are those that have, ah, committed code already.
10. Be silent
Perhaps the most powerful technique --as powerful as all the others combined. Just don't communicate to anyone about anything! If there's no dialog, it's hard for anyone to participate.
Josh's perspective is particularly appropriate for community-led development, but some of the lessons also apply to company led-projects. And most of the lessons are also helpful in starting or growing a community of users. Of course, the real idea is to *not* fall into the trap of these points and instead try to create a community that works with you. Does it require more communications and more transparency? Of course. But it's part and parcel of being open source.
Can you please everyone in the community all the time? Doubtful. Different people have different objectives, whether they are users, developers or business partners and sometimes those objectives come into conflict. But they key lesson is operating openly and with transparency. Communicate, listen and refine.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 7, 2008 10:22 AM
May 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Ever wanted to create a Blu-ray disc?
I'm sitting here beside Sun's A. Sundararajan before the JavaOne keynote starts. He is one of the core developers on Sun's HDcookbook project. I didn't know this, but all of our Blu-ray players have a J2ME JVM inside. So, if you want to create a Blu-ray disc, you'll need to write some Java code. A. Sundararajan and team are tying to make this easier by offering libraries and tooling for developers. It's all under the BSD license, so have at it.
Apparently Canada's Neil Young is here at JavaOne to make an announcement about Blu-ray...
Captain Canada over and out.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on May 6, 2008 09:14 AM
May 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Un-Conferences at Community One
Before kicking off Java One this week in San Francisco, Sun held their second Community One conference, pulling in several thousand developers for a free technical conference. While there was a large keynotes in the morning featuring Ian Murdock of Debian fame and Rich Green, head of Software at Sun, the real appeal was in the smaller sessions throughout the day.
In many ways, Community One was not a single conference, but rather a gathering of mutliple different conferences (and un-conferences) under one roof. There was RedMonk's un-conference which covered topics ranging from business models, to Twitter best practices. There was Startup Camp, which focused on the business and technology of creating a successful startup company (on a budget), as well presentations by developers for developers on topics ranging from how to do load balancing using MySQL Proxy to developing NetBeans plug-ins and scaling out with cloud-based computing. Perhaps the biggest challenge was that there were so many good sessions going on that there's no way you could take it all in. Also notable, the un-conference portion only works if people are fully engaged and actively driving the discussion. It's not meant as a spectator sport, which can be a bit of a change for some conference attendees.
Hopefully Savio or Matt will blog about some of the sessions. And if you missed Community One, there's still plenty of hardcore tech information this week with Java One.
If you haven't checked out an un-conference before, Web-programming guru David Pollak tells me there's another one planned for this weekend in San Francisco called Scala LiftOff that focuses on the lift framework and Scala programming language. Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine and looks to be gaining more traction all the time. While it's not the only solution out there, there are definitely a lot of smart folks contributing to and using Scala and lift. This is worth paying attention to...
Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 5, 2008 10:05 PM
April 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)
I've been thinking about this statement from Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos:
"There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time."
I coming to realize that OSS users split into three, not two, categories:
- A] An organization that has more time than money
- B] An organization that has more money than time but is used to getting what they need for free and is comfortable enough with OSS to rely on their own skills
- C] An organization that has more money than time
While Marten has grouped categories "B" and "C", I think it's important to separate them out. And truth be told, I think category "B" users are more likely to act like category "A" users when a purchase decision to be made. BTW: There is likely an aspect of "how business critical is the application running on OSS" that needs to be overlayed on this user categorization. But that's for another post.
For OSS vendors, it's an uphill battle to get a company in category "A" to spend on a product or subscription. On the other hand, nearly all "early stage" paying customers will come from category "C" users. But over time, the growth of users in category "C" who haven't been converted to customers is outstripped by revenue growth targets that the OSS vendor has. This happens at different points on the revenue curve for different markets (i.e. operating systems vs. app servers vs. content management). I'd venture a guess that the inflection point for most OSS vendors is around $50-100M/year in revenue. From this point forward, the race is on to convert category "B" users into paying customers. Based on my discussion with customers that fall into this category, converting to paid customers is easier said than done. The whole "it's certified and supported" story falls on deaf ears. These customers have been running the OSS product for years and haven't found the need for a support contract, so why get one now?
Recently MySQL was in the news for implementing a strategy squarely focused at category "B" users (even if Marten and team wouldn't classify the move as black and white as I do here). But look around and virtually every leading OSS vendor (SpringSource, Zenoss, MuleSource, etc) has implemented some form of an "incentive" to convert category "B" buyers. In most cases it's a product that is only commercially licensed or only available to paying customers.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this strategy. I am actually a fan of it because it'll drive an order of magnitude more revenue than trusting in the goodness of user hearts (...you know the companies who have money but you've taught them they don't need to spend with you). I'm sure some OSS purists will tell me that I'm wrong. I could very well be. Or maybe their company is still selling into category "C" users? I'd say time will tell, but the shift towards closed-source, or otherwise gated offerings from open source vendors leads me to think I should bet a beer on this one.
What do you think? Is Marten correct, or are there 3 buyer groups as I've described?
BTW...I respect Marten's thinking around OSS enough that being proved wrong at his hands or his thinking won't leave scars ;-)
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 30, 2008 10:55 AM
April 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
As soon as I told my buddy Joe I had borrowed an iPod Touch, he asked me whether I had unlocked it. Hey, it's a Touch, not an iPhone. He told me about an open source application called Ziphone that enables you to unlock any iPhone or iPod Touch in order to install custom applications. Joe's a closet geek, so he had installed an assortment of apps including a Chess game, several productivity apps and probably a hex-editor on his iPhone. In fact, in the course of a two hour party, I ran into at least three other people who had hacked their iPhones successfully with Ziphone.
In some cases these were folks who bought US iPhones to take back with them to Europe in countries where the iPhone isn't yet available for sale. They immediately ran Ziphone, then inserted their standard CIM card and had a working phone.
To be honest, I'd still be a little nervous about unlocking an iPhone given that some early iPhones got bricked when there was a firmware upgrade. And Joe swears Ziphone has already been tested with the as-of-yet unreleased June iPhone firmware upgrade. I installed Ziphone on my iPod Touch and then after some trial and error realized I couldn't install the upgrade to add email, weather etc. So I had to reset the iPod Touch to its original state, install the upgrade and then install Ziphone. I didn't really see any killer apps I had to have using Ziphone, so I've given it a pass for now. And with the iPhone SDK out there, I figure I'd rather have apps that Apple has certified even if it means waiting a while longer.
Will the Ziphone still work when Apple does the next firmware upgrade? Who knows? If you're brave, try it out. But don't call me if you screw up. Call Joe.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 29, 2008 07:45 AM
April 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Guerrilla IT? Sounds like open source
Dan Tynan wrote a great story in InfoWorld recently about Guerrilla IT and how to leverage it by empowering your super users and implementing ways for folks to collaborate and share best practices. I couldn't help but think how so many good innovations have snuck into IT through the back door, the side door and under the radar of what management officially approved.
Consider in the early days that lots of CIOs didn't want to have to deal with PCs or Macintoshes. So departments just approved the expense themselves and that's how killer apps like Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Aldus Pagemaker made inroads into organizations. Sooner or later, IT organizations realized they'd be better off supporting the rogue applications and PCs, rather than fighting them.
I've been seeing the same thing in open source for the last couple of years. Just about every IT organization is running open source, whether it's inrastructure Linux, Apache, MySQL or applications like Bugzilla, Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, or Pentaho. Why? In part because it's just plain easier to download software than it is to get permission. That's the beauty of open source; you don't need to engage with a sales rep or beg for a trial version. Just download and go. Not surprisingly, lots of people do exactly that.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz described a similar incident while on a sales call with a top CIO when he asked them about their use of MySQL. It made for an excellent blog posting and an interesting anecdote in his keynote at the MySQL Conference.
I suspect this phenomena is wide spread. So one good step to encourage Guerrilla IT to be effective is to find out what open source software is running in your shop and why. And if it's working, figure out what best practices you can encourage across other teams or departments. You'll not only empower people, you'll likely save some money in the process.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 28, 2008 07:07 AM
April 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
In a move that makes perfect sense, Black Duck Software acquired Koders. Most of you know Black Duck as a company that helps businesses manage the legal risks around using OSS inside of their company or product. In many cases, Black Duck really helps managers and corporate lawyers get a handle on just how much OSS is being utilized at their company. According to Black Duck,
"...for example in technology M&A, where from 2005-2007 Black Duck products and services were used for due diligence of transactions with a total value exceeding $30 Billion."
That's a shockingly high figure. Wow. Kudos to Black Duck.
The Koders acquisition makes sense because more and more developers are developing by reusing code from external code repositories like Koders. Being able to tap into this source of code (pun intended) will help improve Black Duck's code scanning capabilities. As a result, this acquisition will improve the level of information (and protection) that companies using OSS have at their disposal, whether the source being leveraged is from a traditional OSS project or an online code repository such as Koders.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 28, 2008 06:13 AM
April 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)
SnapLogic has done some interesting work in their latest release being announced this week at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Their focus is on providing a simple approach to integration that is not unlike using RSS for data. It's a cool concept and one worth looking into. There's also a growing number of snaplogic components and connectors (they call them pipelines) available at www.snaplogic.org. For example, there are pre-built components for integrating Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Quickbooks and Excel. It's a good start and it will be interesting to see what else SnapLogic and its community create.
Of course, Snaplogic isn't along in offering open source solutions for integration. There are plenty of different approaches to this problem, ranging from MuleSource and Iona's Artix to JackBe and other mashup tools. But if you're looking for ease of use and visual tools for data integration, SnapLogic is worth investigating.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 23, 2008 09:20 PM
April 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Clipperz, zero-knowledge apps, cloud computing and SaaS
Marco Barulli from Clipperz reached out to introduce their online password-manager. I'd been looking for a good solution for some time now. While their Password manager seems pretty cool, especially the Direct Logins feature, I'm more intrigued by how Marco and team will apply this technology to other areas.
Clipperz had originally used the term "zero-knowledge web application" to describe Clipperz's approach to managing sensitive data via/over the Internet:
"We simply meant that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data!"
It appears that the term "zero-knowledge" has a previous meaning, but I can't think of a better term right now. How is an application a "zero-knowledge" application?
"1. Host-proof hosting: In order to avoid storing readable data on the server a zero-knowledge web application should encrypt and decrypt the data inside the browser.2. Hide nothing: ... Therefore full access to the source code of the application is required.
3. Prevent code changes: ... Therefore it’s of the utmost importance to implement the necessary measures to stop any attempt to modify the code executed by the browser.
4. Learn nothing: ... As a consequence of the “learn nothing” mantra, every zero-knowledge application should be completely anonymous, or at least it should make it impossible to relate the real name or email of a user to his data."
I'd consider #1 and #4 to be must-have capabilities in a world where we access applications and data residing on a 3rd party cloud vendor's infrastructure. This is true for personal data and for corporate data, (difficult to say which would be more important). I don't know if Amazon, Sun, IBM, Microsoft or any of the other current/future cloud providers offer capabilities to address #1 and #4. If not, Clipperz is available under the AGPL or commercial license ;-).
Additionally, I see a use for Clipperz technology at virtually every SaaS company. It's somewhat surprising that companies have been storing corporate data on servers belonging to Google, SugarCRM, Salesforce.com, Yahoo/Zimbra, without these capabilities.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 22, 2008 02:10 PM
April 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Zenoss grows customer base and sets up shop in Austin
Mark Hinkle, VP of Business & Community Development at Zenoss reached out to bring me up to speed on Zenoss.
Zenoss provides software for network, server and application management. Zenoss Core is a community offering licensed under the GPLv2. Customers can purchase support around Zenoss Core, or purchase Zenoss Enterprise Edition, available under a commercial license. Zenoss also has specialized offerings for xSPs that need to manage hundreds/thousands of clients.
Zenoss announced the following news today:
- Added 32 new paying enterprise customers in 1Q08
- Counts over 100 paying enterprise customers including SugarCRM, Rackspace, Disney, Georgia Tech & Instinet
- Over 3,500 active deployments (i.e. potential future paying customers)
- Establishing a development center in Austin, Texas...virtually the Mecca of IT management software development
I asked Mark to speak a little about their competition. Mark stated that Hyperic and Zenoss are complimentary. Hyperic is able to dive deep into the application and server stack, while Zenoss delivers a heterogeneous, broader, view of the IT environment. And while GroundWork and Zenoss offer competing capabilities, there is enough interest in open source IT management products that they are both growing.
Then Mark talked a little about OSS & closed-source IT management vendors meeting up at Barcamp. Mark said (near quote):
"...everyone realized that it's not practical to say we are going to 'replace HP or BMC'. So, we started thinking about how OSS products could compliment closed-source products that are widely used today."
I really like the approach of complimenting current products. It demonstrates that the OSS vendors in question are spending time and resources adding value versus "fighting the good fight against closed-source software". Customers aren't about to rip-and-replace anytime soon. The future of IT will be found in a mixture of both the closed-source and OSS product and business models.
The more I hear about OSS vendors with a GPL'd community product and a commercially licensed enterprise product, the more I'm convinced of this inevitability...almost as others are convinced that SaaS and/or a support business model is the inevitable end game for the software market. Time will tell...
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 21, 2008 11:56 AM
April 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
RedMonk's unconference at Java One
RedMonk, the analyst firm that seems to have the best understanding of developers in my book, is hosting an unconference at JavaOne. This will be held in conjunction with the overall Community One event on Monday May 5th in San Francisco. More info about RedMonk's Unconference is available on the wiki. And you can register for Community Oneonline.
Of course, there's not much of an agenda at this point; that will be determined largely by the participants. But presumably Michael Coté, James Governor and Stephen O'Grady will be on hand. Hope to see many of you there...
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 21, 2008 07:12 AM
April 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)
WaveMaker is a very cool visual AJAX tool
Chris Keene of WakeMaker reached out to me in response to my Freetard post. Since then, I've been reading his blog and have learned a thing or two about his thoughts on Web 2.0 and why WaveMaker is addressing the market in the way they are.
Chris writes:
"Applications are like meteorites - they never migrate, they just land and stick....
The real power of Web 2.0 lies not in modernizing legacy client/server applications, but in modernizing the skill sets of client/server developers. If an app was built in VB or MS Access and it works, leave it there. The real question is what to do with the developer who built that app?"
WaveMaker is focused on this question. Obviously a large percentage of Microsoft customers are happy being so. However, some customers are considering whether Web 2.0 style architectures can be a route towards open standards or potentially a lower risk of vendor lock-in through open source. Hundreds of AJAX toolkits are available today, but this itself is a huge problem. Next, there is still a skills requirement to get the toolkit working and construct a visual development environment like the developer has/had with VB and Visual Studio. That's where WaveMaker comes in. According to the WaveMaker website:
"WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio is an easy-to-use visual builder that enables the drag & drop assembly of scalable, web-applications using Ajax widgets, web services and databases."
Interestingly enough, WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio was built using the WaveMaker foundation (which itself is built on OSS products Hibernate, Spring and Dojo Toolkit). With over 1,000 downloads a day, WaveMaker is beginning to gain traction. Download WaveMaker and follow the tutorial and let us know what you think. WaveMaker is licensed under the AGPL and also available under a commercial license.
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 20, 2008 07:44 AM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Get your software counted in the Open Source Census
Just read about the launch of "The Open Source Census". This is the next step in OpenLogic's efforts to get a better sense of which OSS products are actually used in enterprises. Until now, the OSS product usage data we've seen has been from surveys of people who likely don't know the extent of OSS usage across their company.
So, time for you all to participate:
- Start here
- Take inventory of OSS packages installed
- Upload the results (anonymously) to The Open Source Census
- Review the consolidated results from others
The results so far: 231 machines have been scanned and a total of 52,354 installations of 650 unique OSS packages have been found.
It'll be interesting to see the results in a few weeks.
Kudos to sponsors OpenLogic, IDC, Collabnet, Holme Roberts & Owen, Navica, Olliance Group, Unisys, Open Solutions Alliance and Open Source Business Foundation for making this happen!
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 16, 2008 09:30 PM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
When does a product become a platform?
At the MySQL Conference and Expo this week, we've seen new storage engines popping out of the woodwork and it caused me to wonder at what point MySQL went from being a product to a platform.
From a technical perspective, you could argue that MySQL has always (e.g. for at least 5 years!) been a platform, since it's enabled plug-in features and storage engines since the early days. Heck, Arjen wrote about it back in 2004! The pluggable storage engine API become increasingly important in recent years as people began extending MySQL in many different directions. The virtue of the storage engine API is that they could do this innovation on their own terms, without making the MySQL server team a bottleneck. If every storage engine enhancement had to be reviewed and approved by MySQL, innovation would be much slower. The beauty of a modular architecture was that it enabled these enhancements to happen in parallel without requiring our blessing and sometimes without our knowing!
MySQL is not the first or even the most modular open source product. Obviously, Apache, JBoss, Eclipse, Firefox and many others demonstrated the benefit of modularity much earlier (and perhaps even better) than MySQL. But MySQL's pluggable storage engine architecture is unique in the DBMS industry, where most products were conceived of and designed 20 or more years ago and have a monolothic architecture. And of course, if its a closed source offering, it may not be possible for anyone outside the vendor to make any enhancements.
I remember in my first year at MySQL, our director of architecture Brian Aker was always telling me we should promote the pluggable API. And later when I worked more closely with Engineering, he and other developers on the server team would tell me we needed to make the server more modular and have lots of different ways of having plug-ins. While I don't think anyone was against this type of modularity, it took on a whole new level of importance when Oracle acquired InnoDB back in 2005.
Then it became crystal clear that the plug-in storage engine API was vital to MySQL. By this time there were half a dozen or more different storage engines, including MyISAM, InnoDB, Archive, Federated, CSV, etc. And we knew some customers were creating their own custom storage engines. But that fall and through the MySQL User Conference in 2006, we really began promoting the storage engine API. Amazingly enough, we started seeing more and more innovation happening in the community and among partners in our ecosystem.
One of the first new engines developed outside of MySQL was PBXT by Paul McCullagh of PrimeBase. He had written the first version of a high-speed transactional engine in a matter of months. Since then, PrimeBase has also developed a new engine for Blob Streaming. Paul is giving two talks at our conference this year on these engines.
InfoBright, KickFire, and Nitro EDB are all targeted at high-speed datawarehousing. And there's new engines under development by companies including Tokutek and ScaleDB. ScaleDB is designed by a top-notch team that includes Vern Watts, the original architect of IBM's IMS database management system. Vern worked at IBM from 1968 - 2004 when he retired. The photo below is with myself, Vern and Moshe Shadmon, CEO of ScaleDB.
And of course, Oracle has renewed the InnoDB agreement with MysQL and they continue to enhance InnoDB with new features, including the latest plug-in version announced this week.
MySQL has really become a platform for innovation. And as folks at Sun have often said, "Innovation happens elsewhere." It's great to see this happening in the MySQL community.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 16, 2008 04:10 PM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I'm happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before.
Monday was primarily tutorials as well as our Customer Advisory Board and partner meetings. Those are great sessions as we get tons of input from bleeding edge customers including some of the world's largest web sites, retailers, telecommunications customers and software ISVs and OEMs who embed MySQL. It's a "no BS zone" in that we have product management and lots of developers there to explain what we're doing and get customers input. We always get good ideas here and get to hear what customers like or dislike about our products and offerings. The big issue is that the large customers are all looking for solutions to help them scale more.
We presented some of the ideas under development with the forthcoming Load Balancer as well as some recent results of improvements in InnoDB that help scalability and also some benchmarks on our new Falcon storage engine which has near linear performance on 8-way and 16-way systems. InnoDB also has a new plug-in for MySQL and I'm happy to see that it is published open source under the GPL. And of course, there are also special purpose engines like InfoBright and now KickFire's appliance for Data Warehousing, and PrimeBase's engines PBXT and Blob Streaming.
I'll try to post some more information in the next couple of days including some photos and video from Tuesday's keynotes featuring Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Werner Vogels from Amazon, and more details on our latest announcements around MySQL 5.1 (now RC) and MySQL Workbench (now GA).
You can read more about the conference with all of the real-time session blogging, news and photos posted on PlanetMySQL and on the conference news page. And for those in the bay area, Sun is sponsoring a party Wednesday evening 8:30pm at the Santa Clara convention center (next to the Hyatt) and it's open to all...
Note: I updated this posting with videos & photos from keynote sessions Tuesday and Wednesday.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 16, 2008 02:49 PM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Dave's writes about a new report from Standish Group that claims: FOSS is costing traditional vendors $60B in annual revenues.
Having spent 4+ years doing market forecasts, I can think of two key methodologies that Standish used to come up with the $60B figure.
Option A:
- [1a] Only count revenue that OSS vendors (and products) are generating from the sale of product licenses and/or subscription contracts...i.e. $X
- [2a] Use an uplift factor, y, to account for total revenue lost (license, services and maybe hardware) .i.e. $Xy
- [3a] Add up all the $Xy figures and the result is $60B
If Standish used this approach, I'd seriously question the $60B. Remember that IDC (the premier market forecasting firm in the business) has sized revenue from OSS at $1.8B in 2006, growing 26% to $5.7B in 2011. So, we'd be at $2.3B in OSS revenue by YE2007. Take that and multiply by 5x for the services and hardware revenue lost by traditional software vendors, and you get $11.5B. Not chump change, but not $60B either...which is why I don't think Standish used this approach.
Option B:
- [1b] If the customer is using an OSS product in production, figure out what a comparable closed-source license cost would have been...i.e. $X
- [2b] same as [2a]
- [3b] same as [3a]
The problem with step [1b] above is it assumes that the customer would have, for example, paid for a license of DB2 or Oracle if MySQL or PostgreSQL weren't available. I believe this to be a bad assumption. The majority of OSS use is in situations where the customer would not have purchased anything because the project did not have sufficient funding. As such, I'd question if there is a "real loss" as Standish claims. It's an opportunity for OSS vendors to CREATE net new revenue opportunity. In most cases, this is still an opportunity as the overwhelming majority of OSS used in production does not result in $$$ into an OSS vendor's coffers. In a situation that the customer did in fact pay for the OSS product, and saved $A dollars by using the OSS product, that $A does not disappear. Whatever is saved through the use of OSS is spent elsewhere in the IT organization.... (And traditional vendors see their fair share of this spending).
While I question the $60B figure, I don't think it's a negative for the software market. From my experience, OSS has developed new customers far more than it has stolen customers from the traditional software vendors. And when customers save using OSS, they reinvest those savings into other IT projects.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 16, 2008 10:50 AM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Compiere releases V3.0 of its open source ERP package
Compiere just released version 3.0 of its namesake product with "well over 150 improvements". If you're not familiar with Compiere (hey, how many of us purchase ERP products), think of Compiere as an open source alternative to SAP or Oracle's applications. Judging by a quick look at their product line and Compiere's customer success stories, Compiere is squarely targeted at the SMB customer segment. As such, this would put Compiere up against Microsoft, more than it would against SAP or Oracle.
Compiere offers 3 editions, a free "Community Edition", a "Standard Edition" priced at $25/user/month and a "Professional Edition" priced at $50/user/month. Maybe it's the pricing class that I just took this weekend, but I really like how Compiere has been able to differentiate the 3 offering based on features that will lead the buyer to pick "A" vs. "B". I also like how the "Standard Edition" and "Professional Edition" are following the gated access to OSS products business model that has worked so well for Red Hat and others.
Give Compiere V3.0 a try and let us know what you think. (Personally, I'm not a fan of registering to try out an OSS product. We tried that with WAS CE and some of the contact info we received was quite amusing, not remotely close to PG-rated, but amusing...folks at Compiere: maybe make the info optional, and hence reduce a barrier to trials?)
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 16, 2008 07:23 AM
April 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Why I'm okay that Google Code doesn't support AGPL
Following threads from the Clipperz blog, I read this exchange of messages between Chris DiBona & Greg Stein of Google and a group of folks that want Google to host AGPL'd projects on Google Code. (I'd urge you to read the thread as it's difficult to argue that Chris & Greg are being unreasonable).
As you know, the terms of the GPL only "kick in" when GPL'd code is distributed. Users/companies are not obliged to reveal their changes to GPL'd code unless the code is redistributed outside of their organization. The AGPL fixes this loophole.
Matt and some of the folks replying to Chris & Greg seem to think that Google is wearing its Evil Hat by restricting AGPL'd projects on Google Code. They believe that the growing use of AGPL'd by projects will prevent Google, (Yahoo, EBay, Amazon, or countless other companies that modify & use OSS without redistributing it) from using OSS without contributing their changes back.
I disagree ;-)
Let's start with the various OSS projects that Google et al. pay their employees to work on, and the support, financially or otherwise, that these companies offer to OSS projects. We like to romanticize that OSS projects become solid products through the magical combination of thousands of non-affiliated contributors working for the greater good. The truth is that the majority of contributions, to the majority of leading OSS projects come from someone paid to do so by a vendor. Does anyone really think that Linux would be where it is now if not for IBM, HP, Oracle, Red Hat & Novell employees? Would PHP be where it is without Yahoo's help? Would Firefox be where it is without the significant search-driven dollars that Google pays to Mozilla?
Second, which company in their right mind would open up its differentiated IT assets to competitors? If Linux, Apache HTTPD, PHP and MySQL had originally been licensed under the AGPL, I can almost guarantee that Google et al. would have paid for the right to make their own changes without having to contribute them back (as you can today with many dual-licensed OSS projects). Worst case, Google et al. may never have grown to their current state. Imagine if Google had to decide between closed-source software that they couldn't modify, or open source software that they could modify, but those modifications would be seen by the competition. In both cases the lack of differentiation enabled by IT would have been enough to reconsider the business plan.
I've never been a fan of cutting off my nose to spite my face. Sadly, in the pursuit of "OSS purity", the OSS community comes awful close to doing this all too often. I'm perfectly okay with Google et al. benefiting from OSS. If these vendors don't contribute an equal value back to the OSS community through their own OSS efforts, I'm certain that they have added enough value to the lives of every IT user (OSS proponent or otherwise) to far offset any deficit from the use of OSS without "giving back enough".
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 14, 2008 09:16 PM
April 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Patrick O'Keefe on managing online forums
One of the most important elements of open source is building a great community. Some projects get momentum and some don't and a lot of it has to do with how well you manage online forums. There's a great book on this subject by Patrick O'Keefe called "Managing Online Forums." He's been building online communities since 2000 and has come up with a book that covers just about everything he knows on the subject ranging from what software to use, design layout, privacy, freedom of speech and banning users. Patrick did some logo design work for me a number of years ago and he's a great guy who knows what he's talking about.
For those who are responsible for dealing with community you may already be familiar with many of these issues, but the book has such a broad range of topics it has a lot of information that would be valuable even to those who have been doing this for a while. And if its something you're just getting started with, this is a great guide to help you make sure you do things right from the very beginning. The book is published by The American Management Association (AMACOM).
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 14, 2008 03:12 PM
April 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Matt Asay has been telling me for years about his great pie-making abilities. And he's talked about inviting folks out to ski in Utah for a long time. Well, it all came together for two days this past week with the first ever Open Source Goat Rodeo or OSGR. Not quite a conference, not quite a vacation, it was a gathering of a dozen or so open source luminaries without the usual marketing pitches or CEO spin. Just good conversations, insightful analysis and a modicum of industry gossip.
One clear trend is that open source adoption in Enterprise accounts is continuing to grow rapidly. The majority of open source startups appear to be growing at around 100% or more per year, and many are heading into the $10m - $30m revenue range this year. While most private companies don't release financial information, Alfresco announced that their bookings growth was 320% year over year. While open source revenues are still smaller than the closed source counterparts, the trend is looking better all the time.
Some specific areas of growth that were cited were Software as a Service (Saas or On-Demand applications), as well as mobile platforms. While it's too early to tell how the mobile application space will shake out, it's interesting to note that Apple's iPhone has garnered 28% of the Smartphone market in its first year. And that's without 3G support! While it's not a representative sample, nearly half of OSGR attendees have switched to iPhone. Not surprisingly, Funambol is benefiting from the growth here with solutions for OEMs, ISVs and service providers. Despite the growth of the iPhone, and the launch of their SDK, it's still a fundamentally closed environment. (Or at least, the way Apple defines "open" is different from most open source developers.) It will be interesting to see what other platforms might emerge as the market grows. Android? JavaFX? Mameo? OpenMoko? I wish I could fast forward a couple of years and know the outcome. Maybe it will be clear by OSGR 2010.
It was great to see Marc again; the industry needs more guys who make stuff happen and speak their mind rather than spew the usual PR plattitudes. Still, retirement has mellowed Marc at least a tad. He's out of open source, which is a shame, but I'm sure we'll hear more from him in the future. BTW, Marc wins the award for the most bling'd-out iPhone.
Participants included Matt Asay (Alfresco), Marc Fleury (JBoss founder), John Robb (Zimbra), Fabrizio Copobianco (Funambol), Larry Augustin (open source investor), Lon Johnston (PageOne), Ross Mason (Mulesource), Bryce Roberts (O'Reilly Alpha Tech Venture), Richard Daley (Pentaho) and Jeff Borek (IBM) and me.
I brought some MySQL boxer shorts which folks were happy to oblige me by wearing on their heads for a photo. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I've posted some photos on PicasaWeb and Matt has posted video on YouTube.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 10, 2008 06:31 AM
April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS
I recently caught up with BitRock's CEO, Erica Brescia, & founder Daniel Lopez to hear more about BitRock & BitNami. BitRock's goal is to help drive the widespread use of OSS products by reducing barriers for both customers and OSS ISVs.
The company is best known for its BitRock InstallBuilder cross-platform product that competes with the likes of InstallShield. While the product itself is not OSS, BitRock offers open source projects free licenses to the product.
As OSS ISVs began to use BitRock's InstallBuilder, they started hearing that customers didn't just want the standalone ISV product. Customers wanted the whole stack that the ISV product runs on. In response, BitRock now offers ISVs Custom Stacks (for a fee). BitRock counts OSS leaders such as MySQL, SugarCRM, JasperSoft and Funambol as customers. In fact, over 20% of SugarCRM downloads are attributed to a Custom Stack that BitRock provides to SugarCRM (including SugarCRM & the relevant stack underneath). BitRock is also expanding into a SaaS-based "Network Service", similar to the Red Hat Network. This offering is targeted at OSS vendors who want to push updates, check configurations, etc. at their end customer sites.
While everything BitRock does is closed-source in nature, (and pays the bills), the company has introduced BitNami to further the use of OSS as a community outreach service. BitRock hopes that BitNami will become a leading destination for end users and the average developer that wants an OSS product or an OSS development environment respectively, but doesn't want to hassle with dependencies etc. Since December 2007, BitNami has served up over 100,000 downloads of popular OSS Stacks. BitRock plans to open up the site so anyone can build and host their own OSS stack.
Nearly half of the visitors at BitNami are coming from non-techie sites and are downloading stacks for popular OSS applications such as Wordpress or Joomla. The other half are developers that don't want to collect and install their OSS development environment one piece at a time. Of note, the WAMP distribution is getting more than its fair share of traction as OSS usage continues to grow on Windows.
It will be interesting to track how BitNami evolves. Simplifying the finding, installation and on-going updates to OSS products will surely help the adoption of OSS. The expanding reach of OSS to folks that program out of necessity should help create more 'developers' out of relatively "non-technical" people; and they’ll have an affinity to OSS.
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 8, 2008 01:41 PM
April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
After our late night April Fool's dolphin stunt last week, I got roped into doing an early morning video shoot to preview some of the upcoming items for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara.
I did this on about 4 hours sleep and so I look a bit like Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica, but hopefully less conflicted and not as sleezy. Through the miracle of video editing they made me look semi-coherent, though some things about new storage engines and row-based replication ended up on the cutting room floor. There's a ton of new stuff coming in MySQL 5.1 and the quality and performance look very good. We are in the final release candidate stage and expect that it will be GA in this quarter.
I think we'll also see a lot of innovation in storage engines this year, both from MySQL and from our partners including InnoDB, PrimeBase, InfoBright and others. I think the keynotes will also be very popular, featuring Marten Mickos (MySQL head honcho), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun CEO), Werner Vokels (Amazon CTO), Jeff Roschild (Facebook) and others.
There's been a few excellent "Hitchhacker Guides" to the MySQL Conference giving details about what sessions might be of most interest to PHP developers, Ruby developers, DBAs etc.
You can find the video on Sun's home page for now or along with other videos in Sun's multimedia center. I've also embedded a video player below.
Update: I've added a quickpoll so you can vote for what you're most looking forward to at the conference.
Posted by Zack Urlocker on April 8, 2008 10:28 AM
April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
RIA vendor Curl shifts to Eclipse
Rich Internet Application (RIA) vendor Curl, named InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year in the RIA category, announced that they will be rebasing the Curl IDE on Eclipse. The Eclipse-based product, named Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE) is expected to Beta in mid-2008. Why the rebasing? According to Curl:
"Today's programmers expect to do much of their programming in an integrated development environment (IDE) without having to jump around to unrelated and disconnected tools."
Valid point indeed. I wonder why Curl didn't start with an Eclipse-based IDE from the beginning. In researching this post, I found this InfoWorld article on Curl:
"One of a number of "middleweight" solutions in the RIA (rich Internet application) spectrum, Curl is a language, an IDE, and a runtime engine that goes beyond the capabilities of lighter-weight AJAX without incurring the heavier overhead of the Java or .Net runtime. A number of Curl characteristics make it especially suitable for enterprise use: excellent performance, the ability to handle intermittent connectivity, support for large data sets, and graceful presentation of complex interfaces.....
As I said last August, "Curl may well be the most interesting computer language that you don't already know. Given that you can use the personal tools free forever and deploy the results on the Internet for free, the only barrier to evaluating it would be finding the time""
Ahh, time....hey, if Curl can find the time to rebase on Eclipse, surely some of you can find the time to give the Curl language and runtime a whirl?
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 7, 2008 11:00 PM
April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Can OSS infrastructure vendors thrive in a cloud computing future?
Many of you likely read highlights from Gartner's "The State of Open Source, 2008" report a few weeks back. You can read the report here.
Considering all the hype around cloud computing, I re-read Gartner's comments on OSS and cloud computing:
"By 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.....
Contrast this with cloud-based providers whose cost of services offered (the equivalent of the package provider's cost of goods sold) is dominated by the cost of such infrastructure. This basic economic shift has driven the majority of cloud-based providers to strongly embrace commodity hardware and open-source software to drive down the cost of services offered to unprecedented levels. In particular, unlike the majority of enterprise data centers, the largest cloud-based data centers are self-supporting the Linux kernel instead of paying a license fee for a managed Linux distribution (such as Red Hat) to completely eliminate software license fees. Only by radically reducing their infrastructure costs can cloud-based providers offer the pricing models (based on radically lower profit margins) necessary to disrupt the incumbent packaged software. Thus, the simple economics of "cost of goods sold" will drive "zero software license fee" open source to be the dominant (more than two-thirds) software infrastructure for cloud-based providers."
The punch line is: OSS will virtually own the software infrastructure layer in cloud computing environments, but, the OSS products will be used without paid support. Infrastructure OSS vendors may want to consider this when deciding what features to include in the for-fee offering vs. in the "Community Edition" offering.
Major software & hardware vendors will all offer some form of a cloud computing environment in the future. However, the revenue opportunities for OSS infrastructure vendors does not appear promising:
- Amazon - OSS supported internally?
- Dell - Open source and Microsoft software infrastructure?
- Google - OSS supported internally?
- HP - Open source and Microsoft software infrastructure?
- IBM - IBM's software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?
- Microsoft - Microsoft's software infrastructure
- Oracle - Oracle's software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?
- Red Hat - Red Hat and other third-party open source software infrastructure?
- SAP - ???
- Sun - Oracle's software infrastructure & maybe some OSS (supported internally)?
Cloud computing appears poised to restrict the size of the OSS market much more than any closed-source software vendor could achieve. Luckily, we're at least a decade away from customers defaulting to a cloud computing environment over traditional on-premise environments. That is plenty of time for OSS infrastructure vendors to react...
PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 7, 2008 09:50 PM
April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
While I was on my way to the Open Source Goat Rodeo gathering in Utah, Bill Snyder, another blogger over at InfoWorld, posted a story called "Open Source Databases: The 97 Pound Weakling?" Despite the odd headline, Snyder's post has some interesting factoids and opinions he's pulled from reports by The 451 Group and Gartner.
I'm not sure how Gartner came up with 1% market share for open source databases, but it seems to me to be looking back on the legacy business of OLTP applications rather than looking forward to how things are being done in the online world. I would guess if you poll a hundred CIOs with any online presence at all, you'll get a very different impression of open source DBMS usage.
Interestingly enough, Donald Feinberg of Gartner has said that he expects 70% of IT organizations to be using open source databases within 2 years. Heck, maybe we're at that level already. And more broadly, Gartner has said that they expect 90% of IT organizations to use open source either directly or in embedded form by 2012. So I'm not sure how these numbers jive with what Snyder reports. (And this is not to blame Snyder; it's not easy to come up with an apples to apples comparison of open source market share given that open source is disrupting the old model.)
Even the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) reports that about a third of Oracle users have MySQL in production. Why? Because they're increasingly using MySQL for new web-based applications. And that trend appears to be increasing steadily.
While I can't comment on Snyder's assessment of revenues for Ingres, I can say that the revenues reported for MySQL by the451 group are far below what we posted last year. (Unfortunately, you'll just have to take my word for that, Sun doesn't break out more details on revenues.) And the download volume and interest among customers has only increased so far this year.
Snyder also seems concerned that Open Source databases don't have enough tools to support them. That seems a bit odd to me, considering how large an ecosystem there is for MySQL. Heck there are more than 50 exhibitors at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara next week, so there must be something going on. In fact, pretty much all of the major tools including Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, Embarcadero and Quest all support MySQL. And if you're looking for BI or reporting there are plenty of choices in both open source and traditional vendors including the likes of Pentaho, JasperSoft, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports and so on. There are also plenty of graphical tools from MySQL, including the newest entry MySQL Workbench as well as new tools from up and comers like Webyog.
Admittedly, if Snyder had said there are fewer traditional OLTP applications that use open source databases, I would agree that's a factor that limits adoption in the short term. It seems unlikey that users of systems like Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications or Great Plains will be able to migrate to an open source database any time soon. But more importantly the next generation of enterprise applications (both on premise and onDemand) appear to be running MySQL almost exclusively. That includes the likes of Alfresco, Hyperic, Digium's Asterix, Omniture, RightNow, SugarCRM, Workday, Zimbra and many others.
In Snyder's article it sounds like no one is using open source databases for business-critical applications. Well, nobody but the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Associated Press, BBC, Cardinal Health, Google, Hoovers, HP, Lafarge, Los Alamos Labs, Macy's, MSNBC, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Orbitz, Nortel, Priceline, RightNow, Sabre, Scholastic, Smurfit-Stone, Sony, T-Systems, Virgin Mobile, the Weather Channel, Yahoo and Zappos among others.
Maybe these aren't all mainstream IT companies. But my bet is that the best practices being defined by Web 2.0 companies today will become the enterprise infrastructure of tomorrow.