Microsoft + Zend = Faster PHP?

Microsoft has been on an open source tear lately. Yesterday it was SocialText. Today it's Zend. (Oracle might want to take note: this is how you partner with open source companies.) (OK. No more Oracle commentary.) (Until the next post. :-)

As announced today, as reported by InformationWeek:

Microsoft has been working with Zend to get Zend's PHP open-source scripting language to run faster on its Web server. Windows Information Server has been Microsft's prime platform for its own high-performance language, Active Server Pages. But with Web sites frequently including non-Microsoft technologies, Windows Information Server was handicapped when developers were working with PHP.

No more, apparently. Microsoft knew that to compete with Apache on the web server front, the all-encompassing ecosystem model wasn't going to work. Performance matters on the web - religiously devoted to Microsoft products or not, an IT guy is going to be drawn-and-quartered if the website crawls because Microsoft can't push PHP as fast as the open source alternative.

And so they're partnering.

You've got to admire Microsoft. For all the company has done to try to kill Linux and open source generally, its lack of shame is amazing...and even admirable. The company is moving on. I know people whose perspectives of Microsoft are petrified circa 1980s/1990s. That's unwise. The market is moving fast, and Microsoft is moving with it.

Now with Zend, they're moving even faster.

Microsoft cozies up with another open source company (SocialText)

If you've followed this blog, you know that I feel Microsoft's Sharepoint is the future of Microsoft's enterprise lock-in. Intriguingly, an open source company, SocialText, has joined forces with Microsoft to help them achieve that goal even faster. Ross and company are even providing an easy migration from JotSpot (acquired by Google), just in case you wanted to expedite the lock-in. :-)

Ross is a smart guy and understands that open source is still too young to be linking up solely with open source companies. Microsoft, for its part, recognizes the future, and so has partnered with SugarCRM, Zend, MySQL, and is undoubtedly working toward partnerships with others.

It's a good move. I'll feel bad when I put Sharepoint out of business, but maybe then Ross can come partner with my company. :-)

Google buys another feature (Jotspot)

Google has been in the market lately for features that could never make standalone companies. Jotspot is the latest find. By itself, JotSpot would have struggled to make a viable business - enterprises buy products with wikis as features (like content management systems or office productivity suites), and consumers aren't going to pay enough to fund a wiki company.

But with this acquisition, Google has really pushed its "office 2.0" agenda much further ahead. Alone, JotSpot was just an interesting curiosity. With Google's other cloud-based applications, it starts to look like an interesting application.

Thus, in Innovator's Dilemma fashion, the original innovator, Microsoft (or, more appropriately, WordPerfect/Novell) has been supplanted by the upstart, Google. Not financially. Not yet. But mindshare is on Google's side on this one.

It will be intriguing to see if Office Live will prove an effective counterattack. My bet is that it won't, over time, because Microsoft is too wedded to its Office revenue stream. Maybe the fact that Google mostly fails to sell anything except advertising, which advertising has proven weak for everything except its core search business, will work to its advantage on this one. Just as Red Hat was forced to sell service instead of bits because it couldn't do otherwise, so, too, might Google be forced to succeed in the office 2.0 world precisely because of its inability to monetize it in traditional ways.

Analyst opinion on the Oracle move

I was reading a report from Hapoalim Securities today on the Oracle move (to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux). They clearly understand how open source works (which is atypical - Oracle clearly does not):

• We reiterate our Outperform rating on RHAT because we believe ORCL is likely to fail in its bid to take over the Linux market, or even to capture a significant amount of share from Red Hat. We thus see this as an attractive buying opportunity for RHAT.
  
  
• Previous efforts to “clone” Red Hat Enterprise Linux have all withered due to the same factors we see dooming the Oracle effort: lack of independent software vendor support, insufficent economic return to justify the risk of switching suppliers, and difficulty building a support organization that can deliver high quality support.
  
  
• ORCL’s raisons d’etre for this offering – lower support prices, longer support period for old versions, and a larger support staff – are not likely to be compelling to customers, in our view. Customers can (and do) save far more money by getting a bigger discount on Oracle’s database than they could if all Linux support were free. Customers know the overall size of the vendor’s support organization doesn’t matter, only the number of trained specialists with the necessary expertise does. And the fast-moving Linux marketplace places less value on the need for support for older versions than the moribund application market where this message resonated well.
  
  
• Our belief is that ORCL will at worst end up taking only about two to three market share points from RHAT, almost exclusively in the area of providing the Linux distribution under the database servers in an application, not enough to justify the 40% drop in the stock in the last month as rumors of Oracle’s entry into the Linux market have resurfaced in print.

Yep. I do think that Oracle has good Linux expertise in-house. But translating that into a compelling support offering, especially for someone else's product (which, as I've said before, is more about service than it is about bits and bytes), is going to be a long, expensive road for Oracle, and not financially advantageous for its customers.

(Btw, Oracle, if there's even a shred of credibility to your claim that you made this move "for your customers," then I'd recommend you working more closely with Red Hat to provide the support these customers apparently crave and can't get from Red Hat alone. That would be the right thing to do. Not what you did.)

Forks vs. distributions: the Drupal example

Dries Buytaert, lead developer on Drupal, has written an insightful post on the difference between forking a project and different distributions of that project. As he notes, the differences can be subtle, but ultimately come down to the intentions behind the divergence, revealed in how much the fork/distribution relies on the original project's foundation for future development.

The distinction is critical in light of Oracle's fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: customers that buy into Oracle's support are effectively buying into a fork, and one that Oracle is ill-equipped to support.

But the distinction plays out every day in a myriad of different projects, and occasionally turns into a full-fledged fork, which tends to benefit no one (which is why it rarely happens in the community-minded open source world. Dries writes of Drupal:

It is important that Drupal distributions collaborate, and not compete. To do so, we have to provide Drupal distributions an environment that encourages collaboration, and that allows for specialization (such as custom documentation and support) without introducing incompatibilities that drive competition.

The good news is that we know how to do this. We've been through this already with CivicSpace (previously called "DeanSpace"), a Drupal distribution for online campaign management and grassroots activism. They were quick to realize that the success of the CivicSpace distribution depends on the success Drupal core, and vice versa. The decided they shouldn't fork core development. Instead, CivicSpace decided to do all its development on the drupal.org infrastructure, to synchronize releases, to submit all patches upstream, to centralize bug reports, and to share documentation where possible. Collaboration, not competition.

The bad news is that can be hard work. People will find that creating a distribution is fun and easy, but that being a responsible maintainer might be a lot less fun. Who wants to track changes, write documentation, maintain modules, provide upgrade paths, manage releases and provide support for years to come?

In short, distributions are fine because they add value to the core. Forks are bad because they splinter communities and thereby fragment value, attenuating it until the point that either the fork dies or the originating project dies.

For this reason, I agree with Dries. What's true of Drupal is true of other open source communities. He writes:

As a community we should disapprove Drupal distributions that do not intend to collaborate, that have no signs of long term commitment, or that risk locking people in.

Amen, Dries.

MySQL: Stanford GSB case study (Part II)

Christof Wittig, CEO of db4o, and former student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, has written an excellent follow-up to his original MySQL case study.

Christof does a great job of tracing the challenges facing MySQL, as well as the way the company has successfully responded to many of them. He also identifies an interesting, parallel trend to how Linux spread:

The first enterprise-wide users of MySQL were Internet-enabled start-up companies which turned to free open source software stacks such as LAMP to get their business off the ground. These companies not only saw the lower cost advantages of open source, but also valued the ability to modify parts of the underlying software to differentiate themselves in their own markets. Over time, some of these companies grew into very successful and profitable large enterprises, including Google, Yahoo!, and Sabre Holding’s Travelocity.

In more conventional companies, initially only peripheral installations of MySQL were used to run websites or departmental solutions. Fueled by positive experience, companies then slowly started to “scale out” MySQL into other departments. With MySQL’s growing brand recognition and enhanced service offerings, even more conservative users started to look into MySQL. MySQL actively promoted the intra-company dissemination of its products.

In 2002, it was absolutely the case that Linux was an "edge of the network" phenomenon. Not anymore. It's everywhere, just as I expect MySQL will be.

And, somewhat humorously, as MySQL has added functionality and tweaked its business model to target traditional enterprises, it's starting to get complaints, as Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, notes:

For the first time we have customers that are complaining. And we used to have no customers complaining. It's a question of expectations: When you have a five-star hotel and you charge virtually nothing, then nobody will complain - even if there is something to complain about. Now as we charge more, they also demand more and we pay even more attention to their requests.

This is obviously a good problem to have.

Christof's case study isn't yet publicly available, but watch the URL above for when it is.

Red Hat CEO: We're not cutting prices

Matthew Szulik is on the record today saying that Red Hat has no plans to cut its prices. Good for Red Hat. When you're already #1 in customer value two years running, a shot over the bow shouldn't lead to widespread panic.

Oracle claims to be offering for support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They're not. As Red Hat notes, and as even a cursory investigation would reveal, open source software is not about the bits. It's about the support and the innovation you put into the bits. That's what Red Hat charges for.

It's what Oracle can't replicate with a keynote and a few webpages. Oracle could support Linux - arguably very well. But Oracle didn't choose to support Linux, a technology. It announced that it is offering support for someone else's product, but in the process confused the old world definition of "product" (bits which we can charge big upfront license fees for, as Oracle does) for the new world's definition (support, RHN, etc., for which Red Hat earns its keep over time through a subscription).

That is, Oracle announced support for...Red Hat's support, thinking that it was announcing support for Red Hat's bits and bytes.

It's a bit like me saying I'm now offering support for IBM Global Services. Sure, I could try. I could "fork" those services. But would you buy them? Neither would I.

In like manner, Oracle can offer huge discounts on Red Hat Enterprise LInux - the bits and bytes. But it's hard to discount beyond what the discounts Red Hat already offers: 100%. How much lower than free can Oracle go?

No, Oracle tried to confuse the issue, or was simply confused. It can't support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because really Red Hat's product is the service it puts into the kernel, both pre- and post-sale. Oracle can declare that it will answer the phone faster, but who cares? it won't (and can't) have the answers when you call? It can say that it's supporting Red Hat's...support, but it isn't.

Oracle is offering nothing with this move. But at least it's offering 50% off.

News: Polycom partners with Digium to provide SIP-based SMB offering

Cool news on the telephony front: Polycom and Digium are partnering to provide telephony solutions for the SMB market. From the press release:

Polycom's award-winning SIP desktop and conference phones will be combined with Digium's Asterisk Business Edition, the professional-grade version of Asterisk, the industry's first open source PBX. Through the combined Digium and Polycom offering, SMB customers will have access to advanced telephony solutions which will be more affordable compared to proprietary systems. Additionally, the new offering will give customers the control, rapid feature development and deployment, and rich feature base that the Asterisk open source community and its partners provide. Per the agreement, Polycom will also be the preferred VoIP phone provider for Digium solutions.

Great work, John, Mark, and team. Nothing like knocking down a massive partnership in your first few months of venture funding. :-)

Graham: 18 mistakes that kill startups

I've had this Paul Graham post bookmarked for a week or so, and only just got around to reading it. Pithy, and dead on. Maybe even his location point. ;-)

I particularly liked this point, because it applies so well to open source, where no one has figured out The Right Model (in most startups it's hard enough to figure out the right product):

In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.

So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended—often so different that it doesn't even seem like the same company. You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

Great insight. Here's the list, but you really need to read the commentary to learn from it:

1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort

Alan Cox: Open source not always more secure (Duh)

In the interest of putting things in soundbite-sized nuggets of "wisdom," people sometimes say dumb things like "proprietary software is not secure" or "open source is secure." As Alan Cox pointed out at LinuxWorld London this week, however, this is just not true, and doesn't really help anyone's cause:

Things appear in the media like open source software is more secure, more reliable and there are less bugs.

Those are very dangerous statements. That analysis just looks at well-known projects. If you take 150 projects from SourceForge [a repository for open source code], you do not get the same marks as you would with the Linux kernel. The debate of Microsoft saying 'Look how secure we are' versus Linux saying, 'We're more secure' is not looking at the important points.

High quality only applies to some projects — those with good code review and those with good authors.

While his statements may be anathema to the open source delusional (who are embroiled in the political open source vs. closed source fight, as Dana notes), they just make sense.

The fact that I write something and release it under an open source license says nothing about its inherent quality. The fact that several billion people on the planet can opt to look at it doesn't make it more secure, either. And even if 99% of the world's population did stare long and hard at that code, it wouldn't make any difference, because 99% of the world are just like me: code illiterate.

Open source software, in its optimal form - great authors and a great community around it - can't be beaten for security. But open source, by itself, is just a licensing and development methodology. It's not inherently good or bad, secure or not secure.

Dave and I made this point during our Oracle "Open" World presentation this week, and the IT-centric crowd didn't bat an eye. They understood that quality of code can't be retrofitted onto software through process - it has to start with good authorship.

I just wish the political nuts on both sides of the debate got it, too, so that we could go back to talking about features, price, and support. You know, the things real buyers care about.

Attribution and full-blooded open sourceness

Ah, back to the delightsome days of accusations of mudblood open source. The newest whipping boy? Attribution clauses.

Who uses attribution? Several of the most promising open source companies...as well as the European Union (EUPL). They seem to like open source, as does the Creative Commons (which also uses attribution as a core licensing element). Oh, and so does Mozilla, which is in a tussle with Debian about improper use of its trademarks. (See, you have to police trademarks if you want to keep them and, no, trademarks are not from Satan.)

So, attribution is actually fairly common in open source. You might not know this, but the OSI approved attribution licenses way back when (e.g., Attribution Assurance License, as well as the original BSD license). And even recently (CDDL). But they're not in vogue now with "the community," I guess.

Here's why they should be:

1. If someone benefits from open source, they should contribute back. In Marten Mickos' language, users can contribute cash or code (bug reporting, bug fixes, functionality improvements, etc.). But what if the license doesn't nudge them to do so? Then they won't (at least, 99% of the time).
   
   (This is why I've complained about Google and Yahoo!, two of the industry's biggest beneficiaries of open source. They and nearly every other Web 2.0 company use and modify open source software and provide commensurately little value back because they don't have to - the ASP loophole in the GPL allows them to benefit without giving back their modifications, or cash, or...
   
   Attribution. Attribution is a way of claiming some value back in return for modification and use of one's software, even if the user opts not to contribute code or cash. It's not onerous. It's fair. You don't want to give me money for my software, or modifications you make to my software? Fine. At least reflect where you got it.
   
   
2. Attribution does not burden distribution. If you think it does, I invite you to talk to the scads of hosting companies and others that are using Alfresco's Community product, for example. (Try Intelliant, for one.) We find out about them all the time - they abide by our MPL license and have proper attribution. It's a win-win.
   
   Even if it were burdensome, since when does an open source project need to concern itself with facilitating generous financial returns on its software? Red Hat probably would have loved to have had a non-GPL version of Linux to sell when it started. Instead, it adapted the traditional software model and is the better for it.
   
   Here's what the Open Source Definition actually requires:

   The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

   Do you see anything in there that would restrict attribution? Me, neither. Read the other nine elements of the OSD - they don't impinge on attribution, either.
   
   
3. Attribution fits a model of Droit Morale. Maybe not so important in the US, but very important in Europe, especially France and Germany. If I make a nice painting in France, for example, I have a moral right to attribution, among other things.
   
   Again, this sort of right hits home with applications, which have a UI, and less so with infrastructure software like a database. But it's important for many developers that the UI they create be attributed to them.
   
   
4. Attribution protects customers. Developers want to distribute their software widely, but they also want to ensure they get credit (or, in some licenses, if you change the software they want to make sure you don't blame them for the problems that might result). It's also important to many end-users that they're getting the genuine brand (trademark) they trust. Just as Red Hat from a source other than Red Hat is something much less, so, too, is SugarCRM from another source less than SugarCRM. Attribution is a way of protecting the customer experience without burdening distribution.

These are just a few reasons to welcome, not discourage, attribution. If you disagree, I invite you to comment.

Btw, the OSI is actively considering attribution clauses (I'm on the board), so stay tuned to see how that debate plays out.

European Union funding tools to test open source quality

The European Commission has raised over $3M to fund a project that will test the quality of open source software.

Among its goals, the SQO-OSS will benchmark the quality of source code to help to prove its suitability for deployment in businesses. It will also publish a league table rating open source applications according to their perceived quality.

"An industry matures when its products become standardised," said Diomidis Spinellis, project lead, and professor at the University of Athens in Greece. "Through the objective evaluation of open source projects, SQO-OSS will provide many smaller and less known projects with the visibility and respectability they deserve," Spinellis added.

Quality is always in the eye of the beholder (or, rather, in the eye of the IT buyer that is implementing the software), but this study should be a useful addition to the conversation.

Breaking news! MySQL considers offering Oracle database support

In a dramatic twist on Oracle's news yesterday that it will be offering support for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, word on the street is that MySQL is considering offering support for Oracle's venerable database.

The hitch, however, is pricing. Early estimates suggest that MySQL would need to charge 1000% the cost of Oracle's typical pricing to make a profit on the support, given the persistent bugginess of proprietary databases compared to MySQL.

/tongue out of cheek

Walmart.com runs open source

Walmart.com is relaunching, and has open source at its core. MySQL? Well, probably (that's a given these days), but this news is even more significant, because it's OpenLaszlo from Laszlo Systems. OpenLaszlo is a great way to add rich media functionality to your website. WalMart agrees.

Open source Java within 2006

Jonathan is now on the record as saying that we'll have open source Java within the next 30-60 days. As reported by InfoWorld:

Demonstrating a perhaps more aggressive path than anticipated, Sun Microsystems is set to announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.

The core platform encompasses the Standard Edition of Java, and it will be offered via an open source format under an OSI (Open Source Initiative)-approved license, likely the same one used for Sun's open source Solaris OS. Sun officials, including Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, have talked about Java being offered via open source in stages later this year and into 2007. Parts of it, such as the Java Enterprise Edition, already are available via open source, with the GlassFish application server constituting the open source enterprise variant.

Crazy thought: Red Hat could provide Level 3 support for Oracle's Linux

I haven't thought this through yet (obviously), but thought the idea was amusing, if not useful. My bet is that companies are going to want to keep going to Red Hat for support given Red Hat's leadership on the Linux kernel. But some may be tempted by the alleged 50% discount Oracle is offering.

But let's say the discount is real. Here's a crazy thought: why couldn't Red Hat charge an additional 25% to offer Level 3 support for Oracle's Red Hat Linux?

In this way, Oracle takes on the heavy lifting on support (Levels 1 and 2), Red Hat offers peace-of-mind for the thorniest issues (Level 3), and both get paid for their value.

This, in short, gives customers what they want (Red Hat backing up Linux) and allows customers the discount they supposedly have been clamoring for. In short, it gives them



Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in other words, but at a 25% discount.

(See Red Hat's response to Oracle's move.)

Shuttleworth on the Oracle move

The451 is carrying a great analysis of the Oracle Linux move by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the leading community-based Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Here's a gem from Mark:

I think we can expect Oracle to get frustrated with supporting someone else's codebase. If it takes off from a business perspective, then fine, but I really doubt that large numbers of people will switch from Red Hat to Oracle as a provider of support for Red Hat. Red Hat, certainly, is not going to make it easy for customers to live on both sides of the fence, and most companies will want SOME access to Red Hat. So if Oracle wants to make money from "owning a linux stack" then I don't think this is a winner. On the other hand, if they just want to keep a lid on Red Hat, without rocking the boat too much, then this works fairly well.

Fundamentally, though, this is still free software in a proprietary wrapper. The pricing may be different, but it's still old-school thinking. I don't think anybody who will consider jumping to Ubuntu from Red Hat will pause very long on the Oracle option.

Also see The451's pre-Oracle announcement discussion with Mark - Mark told The451 that an Oracle/Ubuntu link-up is a matter of when, not if.

Whose problem is Oracle trying to solve?

I'm actually trying to get some sleep, but I can't let this go. The more I think about Oracle's move, and the more emails/comments flood in, the more I want, with Dave Dargo, to call "foul."

Here are a few reasons:

1. Red Hat has for the last two years been rated #1 in customer value. By customers. Regardless of where Oracle stands on that list (#39 of 41), being #1 is a Big Deal. In fact, I'd probably interpret #1 to mean that customers like doing business with Red Hat, feel like they're getting more than their money's worth, and generally don't plan on leaving Red Hat any time soon. Perhaps this is part of Oracle's reason for the move...?
   
   
2. The pricing Oracle gave is completely bogus, as Don Marti's comment to my original post indicates, as does common sense. Red Hat has been selling to the enterprise for over seven years. VPA and discounts apply. Oracle uses its discounted pricing against Red Hat's list pricing. It's a clever but deceptive tactic.
   
   
3. Bug fixes. Oracle said that Red Hat forces customers to upgrade to future releases to get bug fixes (effectively killing their ability to stop paying for Red Hat Network/support). This is 100% wrong, as Oracle knows (and as every Red Hat customer knows).
   
   
4. Certifcations. What will happen to Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementations that Oracle patches? Fine, Oracle says that it will support its own patches, but this says nothing about the other applications that these applications may well break. Interestingly, this is a problem that Charles Phillips identified last year:

   [Customers] are bogged down by the dependencies between applications. Add a patch in Linux and five other things break.

   In other words, once a new patch is applied, all bets are off on whether all those non-Oracle applications (or even the Oracle applications) will still work. Are you going to trust Oracle to make sure your non-Oracle applications work? Like your SAP, IBM, etc. implementation? Red Hat serves as a useful third-party platform provider that Oracle cannot hope to match, simply because it has too much at stake (Middleware, database, applications, etc.).
   
   
5. What happens to support for Tomcat/Hibernate/Struts/Seam/etc. running on RHEL supporting Oracle?
   
   
6. Could it be that Oracle's real goal is to contain open source penetration? Few would lose more (or could gain more, if they'd just embrace it) if open source continues its move up the stack. The Oracle franchise is increasingly threatened by open source, which is isolating Oracle's relational database as a dated container, while web services, contemporary extraction tools, virtualization, and the cache file system hamper Oracle's growth and economics.
   
   
7. And what happens in all this to the value of Open Solaris? HP UX? AIX? Oracle just shot them.

Some have chided me for not seeing this as a case of honest competition between friends. True, I don't. I see this move as potentially benefiting Oracle, but not its customers or partners. Its customers are apparently ecstatically happy with Red Hat's value, as measured by CIO Insight.

All of which begs the question: What (or whose) problem is Oracle trying to solve?

More on Oracle (Dave Dargo)

I should have looked to Dave Dargo's blog first when the Oracle news hit. Dave, for those who don't remember, was a longtime Oracle employee and started and ran Oracle's open source program office. He knows quite a bit about Oracle and Linux.

And he's calling "foul" on Oracle's announcement today, with a great deal of insight into why.

He persuasively argues that Oracle's discounted support will actually be dramatically more expensive (like a gazillion percent more :-), the service won't be as good (for reasons similar to those that I argued), and that Oracle has no history of providing superior value at a lower cost, while Red Hat has that in spades:

But what about the other part of that quote, that support has to be better. There's a survey from CIOInsight [PDF] that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIOs in 2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they ranked 39 out of 41. [Emphasis mine.]

The other thing I'm most curious about is the concept of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). The claim is that it takes less than a minute to switch from Red Hat's Network (RHN) to ULN. It's going to take more than a minute, and a fair amount of cost, to get through the legal agreements and process of switching over. But even with that aside, I'm mostly curious as to why Oracle's first real support network is for someone else's product. Where's the Oracle Database Network and Applications Network and PeopleSoft Network and Siebel Network? Where are the support infrastructure networks for Oracle's own products to automatically distribute fixes, patches and alerts? It's amazing that they can provide all that for a mere $399 for a competitor's products, but not for their own $200,000 product.

At the end of the day they still haven't answered the basic question of how eliminating choice benefits the customer, and that's bull*&#%.

Good points, Dave. Head over to his blog to get more. It's fascinating analysis.

Oracle tries to kill Red Hat (...with friends like this...)

I'm here at Oracle "Open" World, and am a bit shocked by what I'm seeing. Oracle, longtime partner to Red Hat, is rolling out the next phase of its Unbreakable Linux program, designed to kill Red Hat and Novell (whatever Larry Ellison might say to the contrary). With partners like Oracle, who needs competitors?

Now, Oracle will say that it's offering a level of support unmatched by Red Hat, and it will also say that this program is not designed to kill Red Hat. Maybe. I talked with some Oracle employees, and they were convincing that some Oracle customers have complained about Red Hat's service/support.

But even if true (and I've heard as much grousing about Oracle's support as I have Red Hat's, or anyone else's for that matter - the fact is, no one likes support if they have to use it), there were better ways to deliver superior support without undermining one's partner. Like offering it as a value-added feature to the partner's standard support. But I digress....

Maybe this is why Oracle has been aggressively recruiting kernel developers out of Novell. Novell has lost three in the last several months, making it hard for Novell to claim any leadership against Red Hat, which is a hard-core innovator on the kernel. Oracle understands that to support a community-based product, it has to be part of that community.

This, incidentally, is still the best reason for Red Hat customers to stay with Red Hat for support: Red Hat is doing more to innovate and develop the kernel than anyone else, including Oracle. Source of code matters more than source code in Linux, and Red Hat is the predominant source.

Oracle customers need to ask themselves if they want a forked version of Red Hat Linux. Like Red Hat or not, they have served a useful function of consolidating interest in Linux and thereby fostering commercial adoption of Linux. By providing non-standard kernel patches, Oracle is forking the kernel and setting themselves up to support the fork forever.

Edward Screven, Oracle's CTO, denies this, saying that they're only providing bug fixes, not new features:

We think it's important not to fragment the market. We will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux. Every time Red Hat distributes a new version we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of the community. We have years of Linux engineering experience. Several Oracle employees are Linux mainline maintainers.

That's welcome news, but hard to implement in practice. I heard from several Oracle employees today that one of the reasons for the move was that customers complain that Red Hat doesn't fix bugs fast enough and doesn't add requested functionality fast enough.

Note to such customers: neither will Oracle.

I find it difficult to impossible to believe that Red Hat, with more control and insight into the Linux kernel than any other company, can be beaten on providing timely bug fixes. Regardless, the larger question is on feature requests if, in fact, this is something that Oracle plans to do (which it is not planning, according to public reports).

If there is an intent to move these patches into the kernel, Oracle won't be able to force its will on the kernel any more than Red Hat is able to. Oracle's alleged big customers that are demanding this level of support from Red Hat are going to find Oracle equally impotent to be able to absolutely force its will onto the kernel, leaving the customers...forked. I suspect that no one wants this.

Anyway, time to let Oracle tell its own story. Here's why they're doing it:

Larry Ellison cited a range of problems with current Linux support:



Oracle thinks it can do better on service levels:



And price (though this has to be a complete canard because I've yet to find a big enterprise that thinks Linux - Red Hat or otherwise - is pricey compared to the alternatives (remember Unix?):



And, lest you missed the point that Oracle's support is cheaper than Red Hat's, Ellison pounded home on the theme:



So, where does this leave us? With Oracle claiming to provide better support on a product that it has less control over than Red Hat does. I'm not seeing the logic there, but I do understand that Oracle's scale allows it to undercut Red Hat on pricing. Even without that scale, the fact that it isn't investing the same resources into Linux that Red Hat is leaves it able to charge less for the support.

It will be interesting to see how Red Hat responds. Given Red Hat's strength in creating and supporting the Linux kernel, as well as its newfound JBoss arsenal, I don't think it's time to head for the exits. Red Hat is still the premium provider of Linux. This complicates things, but doesn't significantly change them.

(Btw, any one else think that Oracle's failed acquisition of JBoss is a big part of this announcement? It would be sad if personal pique could be the motivation for such a big announcement, but I wouldn't count it out.)

No open source welcome here

Just when you think the world is getting more savvy on open source...

I was reviewing a contract the other day with a major Fortune 500 institution. This is a forward-looking institution with a massive IT budget and, no doubt, Linux and other open source running rampant throughout its organization.

I was therefore amused to see this clause in the contract they provided to us:

Alfresco hereby warrants that the Software contains no open source code and that it will not provide any open source software as part of its Services or Software.

Um, we have a problem here....

I explained to them that all of our software is open source, and why they should be happy about this fact. They now are, but it's always surprising to find persistent misconceptions about open source in the savviest of companies.

It reminds me of a presentation I delivered years ago to the IT workers of the State of Texas. My presentation followed that of the State's general counsel (for IT, anyway), who spent her 45 minutes warning the IT staff to not use open source and to wait until the State had a formal policy in place for adoption of open source.

As soon as she left the room, I asked for a raise of hands for "All those currently using open source in your work." 80% of the hands went up (and I suspect the other 20% were lying :-).

Open source is everywhere. Might as well get used to it.

CSFB notes on the first day of Oracle Open World

Jason Maynard, CSFB analyst extraordinaire, is at Oracle Open World and is finding some common themes surfacing:

1. "Scale matters." The company has enough R&D to support ongoing development efforts for all their applications and technologies.
   
   
2. "Better information gives better results." The volume of information is increasing at a phenomenal rate, creating the need for technology solutions that can harness the information explosion. Oracle’s technology solutions address this issue, as seen in its roadmap for Oracle 10G and 11G.
   
   
3. "Ecosystem & Partner Relationships." Oracle is working hard with its partners to provide interoperability. Relationships with rivals like IBM and Microsoft is still intense but these vendors are finding pragmatic common ground given customer needs.

Good intel, Jason. I continue to believe of the large enterprise ecosystems, Oracle has the best chance of being the hub of a large open source ecosystem.

But I still think that Oracle needs to choose carefully how it deploys Linux as part of that ecosystem strategy.

When open becomes closed (licensing)

I was on a call the other day, and we were discussing whether it was appropriate to look into the intent underlying an open source license, or whether one should accept it "as is," on its face. I'm in the latter camp, believing the Open Source Definition applies to the words of a license, and not to any inferred intent behind those words.

The point was made, however, that it's impossible to read the GPL without seeing Richard Stallman's intentions/philosophy all over the license. Intentions certainly matter to Richard. However, as can be seen with GPLv3, it's very difficult to bound one's intentions once efforts kick in to impose a political view on the world through software.

It is this very grasping nature of Richard's, however, that makes the GPL the software capitalist's best friend. Richard never intended this. His purpose is freedom. But the problem with trying to control outcomes is that one can't help but control the means to those ends, as well. (I wrote about Machiavelli during my Masters program along this very same vein - to control the ends we must control the means to those ends. There is no other way to do it.)

So, Richard, by trying to guarantee freedom has instead created a license that mostly constrains it. Though people debate this point, the BSD actually offers more freedom. Last time I checked, freedom meant:

• the condition of being free; the power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints
  
• exemption: immunity from an obligation or duty

By this metric, then, the GPL is hardly a free software license. Forcing people to share's one's version of freedom is not...free. In fact, I'd argue that it's the closest thing to traditional copyright that the open source world has ever devised.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a capitalist. Therefore, I love the GPL. The GPL offers vendors a way to freely (as in cost and "freedom") distribute their software without any fear that a competitor will use it. Why? Because to do so would be like dropping a neutron bomb on their own software. It's just not going to happen. (I wrote a long paper on this back when I was still Larry Lessig's student at Stanford Law School - you might enjoy it. He gave me a good grade. :-)

In the ongoing debates about whether attribution licenses are open source, whether GPLv3 is open source, etc., please keep in mind that the supposed paragon of software freedom is also the license that most tightly imposes a distinct lack of freedom on downstream users. If you're a capitalist like me, you probably like this fact. But if you're a software developer...?

IT Spending in 2006 (InformationWeek 500)

InformationWeek has a great story and survey detailing where and how the industry's top enterprises spend their IT dollars. The results are illuminating, and portend great things for open source.

Interestingly, IT dollars continue to rise, even as overall company revenues fell from 2005 to 2006:

As for where those dollars are going, despite all the hype that licenses don't matter (because the real costs are in implementation), the numbers don't bear that hype out. The numbers say, "Enterprises are wasting money on licenses."

The license cost savings open source delivers (as compared, say, to Microsoft), however, would be negated if open source implementations cost more (in fact, they cost less or at least give the CIO choice as to how she spends those dollars) or if open source required more IT personnel (clearly the biggest IT cost). But experience proves otherwise, as The Robert Frances Group has written.

Besides, as The Christian Science Monitor and others have found, open source makes those IT personnel costs stretch farther, deliver more innovation, etc. Open source makes IT dollars work for the enterprise, and not for the vendor.

So, Nick, maybe it's not that IT Doesn't Matter, but rather that proprietary IT doesn't matter. Or won't, as more companies start feeling the benefits of open source. Money will still be spent on IT, but the smart money is on open source IT.

Wither the right to fork?

Brian Behlendorf dubs it the cardinal rule of open source. I think he's right. Apply Ockham's Razor to the Open Source Definition and "right to fork" results.

Yet it rarely happens.

Joomla/Mambo. Adempiere/Compiere. BSD and all its children. These are the exceptions to the rule.

Most open source projects never fork. I suspect the primary reason has to do with the open source ethos (Cooperation first, fork as a last resort) and human logos/sloth (Easier to help propel a rolling stone than to exert force to budge an inert one). And to the extent that projects do fork, it's interesting to see how often the branch wins out over the trunk. Almost never (by my admittedly unscientific estimate).

Still, even if no one ever forks, it's still a good thing. It's a good thing because the right to do something often serves as a useful surrogate for actually doing it.

Maybe we should therefore stop acting like Chicken Little over GPLv3 and the fragmentation that may result. You can fork, but you can't stop others from incorporating your fork back into the main tree. Maybe a thousand Linux forks will simply make a better Linux.

Grafting in open source companies

The past few weeks have been a lesson in olive tree gardening. Not literally, of course. Instead, I'm referring to the analogy between how one grafts olive trees and how one grafts employees into a company. The tie between the two hit me in my morning reading today....

When we think of gardening, we normally think of planting a seed, weeding around it, fertilizing the ground, and waiting for something to grow. In the case of olive trees, however, the process really kicks in once the "something" (the olive tree) has already grown. If the olive tree is providing bad fruit (olives), or a low volume of good fruit, you can graft in branches from a different olive tree - one that produces great olives in abundance - and it can actually change the tree such that it starts to produce good olives, and lots of them.

The important thing in the process is to keep the balance in the tree. You can't over-graft a tree - its roots will only support so much. Therefore, it's important to gradually graft in good branches.

This applies to how one hires for open source companies. Yes, it applies to how any company hires, but it's particularly true in the case of open source, because open source is a dramatically different way of doing business. It's normal to look a person's resume, see exceptional experience in a candidate, and assume it will automatically translate into success at one's company, open source or no.

This is not wise, however, as hiring people is about their cultural and competency fit with a company. Much as we'd like to look at job candidates as simple math equations involving dollars and cents, they are always more than this. Hence, what Jack and Suzy Welch write in BusinessWeek about M&A holds true for adding people to a company, generally:

...[R]ecognize that the cultural fit of two companies is as important as strategic fit--if not more so. Oh, how exciting it seems when a merger or acquisition makes perfect sense in terms of products, technologies, and numbers. But what a disaster it can and will be if the two companies operate with distinctly different values. The fact is some cultures don't combine--they combust.

The first rule of good open source hiring, then, has almost nothing to do with open source. You need to find people that fit the values of your company.

For an open source company, people need to somewhat ego-free or, rather, teachable, because there can't be barriers between one's community and the company. You can't assume you know what needs to be done in an open source company until you've slogged in the trenches for a spell.

I really like working with John Powell (former COO of Business Objects) and John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) because they fit this mold. Sure, they have egos. But not the kind that make them think they know all the answers. Instead, their egos make them self-confident enough to accept that they don't know everything, and that they have a lot to learn from their community of developers, users, and customers. (Some may remember that I once questioned whether these two were the right ones to start an open source company. Because of this trait, however, they've done an excellent job of learning open source on the job.)

The second big requirement is that open source companies need to be careful how they grow. Because of a shortage of supply of experienced open source business people, it's critical that an open source company carefully, gradually "graft" in new employees. Graft them in too quickly and the new branches will overcome the old roots.

This reminds me of the Larry Augustin gave me a few months back. Larry's point was that open source companies may need to grow more organically - at least, initially - than proprietary companies do. You don't have the luxury of a big upfront license fee (recognizable revenue) to build out with, so you have to patiently tend the "olive tree" until revenues kick in. So, you keep field sales to a minimum and take a lower-cost, longer ramp up to sales. This is more efficient and more in keeping with the strengths of the open source model, which is as much about business model as it is about development model.

So, again, graft carefully. An open source company is a delicate balance of community and commercialization. Too much of the latter, too soon, and you end up looking, acting, and dying like a proprietary software company. It's simply not sustainable at the lower ASPs that most open source companies have.

Third, open source companies require innovative, creative thinkers. No one has figured out The Right Model for open source. The proprietary software world is largely in stasis in terms of business model - we know how to build those businesses (though that doesn't mean it's easy to do so). In open source, however, we're in a fecund time of exploration and experimentation. Yes, there are lessons to be learned from the Siebels and FileNets, but it's critical to find people that see a future beyond these old models, because open source companies depend on bending old rules and installing new paradigms.

I have loved working in the open source business community. It's a huge challenge, but I'm constantly impressed by the new open source employees who "cross the chasm" and become productive open source business citizens. Not everyone makes the leap. Most will wait for the late adopter phase when their personal returns for making the transition will be minimal (but so, too, will the risk be). For those willing to embrace the grafting process, however, there's no better time or place to work in technology.

IBM: Proof that (proprietary) enterprise software is not dead (yet)

Jason Maynard's CSFB report this morning has a tidy analysis of IBM's Q3 numbers. They're a clear indication of why proprietary software will remain with us for some time.

• IBM’s Q3 results should be overall positive for the greater software industry. The Q3 report showed that demand in key segments continues to be healthy, and barring any major market share gains, we believe independent vendors should be able to generate similar growth results. In addition, while services bookings were again behind plan, management indicated that the pipeline was strong and was optimistic about the future. This is a stark contrast to last quarter when management was worried about a potential slowdown in IT spending. Furthermore, we view IBM’s optimism as another sign that the stage is being set for the year-end budget flush scenario to play out.
  
  
• Within the company’s software business, total revenue came in at $4.4 billion, up 9% year over year, and was ahead of Credit Suisse’s software estimate of $4.2 billion....We found IBM’s attention and focus during the earnings call on the software business as an interesting signal that more acquisitions are likely down the road.
  
  
• Consistent with prior quarters, IBM’s WebSphere products continued to experience strong growth. In total, WebSphere grew 30% y/y (up from 17% in Q2), driven by continued adoption/demand for SOA deployments. The leading independent vendors in this space, BEA and Tibco have also experienced strong demand for their products, however total revenue growth in the last quarter (19% for BEA, 14% for Tibco) was slower than WebSphere. While it is clear that end demand continues to be strong and the WebSphere brand is somewhat of a catch-all, the growth is still impressive.
  
  
• IBM’s information management products grew 12%, and the company disclosed that database peripherals grew 50% in the quarter. IBM again declined to disclose the actual performance of the database, and we continue to interpret this omission as a sign that Oracle is outgrowing IBM’s distributed database.
  
  And from a separate Maynard report:
  
  
• Going into the seasonally strong fourth quarter, we continue to believe the stage is being set for the year-end budget flush scenario to play out. We believe that most vendors carried strong pipelines into the fourth quarter and we feel that in general, businesses have saved a good portion of their budget for the end of the year. Looking ahead into 2007, we continue to believe that next year should be a relatively good year for software budgets. We continue to hear feedback from CIO’s that On Demand, offshoring, and virtualization are enabling organizations to lower the cost of IT operations, thereby freeing up capital for new projects. From a macro perspective, slowing productivity growth could be another factor that will cause businesses to increase investing in value enhancing technology.

So, the good news for enterprise software vendors is that you still have several years of historically anomalous returns. But I can't help but think of Andrew Marvell's classic poem, "To His Coy Mistress," wherein the narrator lauds his lady for her virtuous resolve, but suggests that it's time to party now because the end is near:

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave 's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Nor sell software. Eat, drink, and be merry now. For tomorrow you'll be in open source land.

Why I write

I was going to say 'Why I blog," but Nick called to my attention what an ugly word that is. So I'll say "write," instead. (Besides, it also applies to email. I write voluminous emails, much to the recipients' chagrin.)

I've had a few people ask lately how I find the time to write (blog) so much. And a few people asked if I didn't have a real job that took my time.

On that account, let's just say that I manage a business that doubles revenue every quarter. Enough said.

As to why I write, that's also easy. Because it helps me to think. What may seem muddled here often crystallizes right after I hit "Publish." Or it will when I get comments back from people telling me where my reasoning breaks down.

In short, some people like meetings to help them think. Me? I write, and read others' writings.

As for when I write, it's usually when I'm on a conference call. That time is productive for someone on the call, I'm sure. But rarely for me. So next time you call me, pardon the tapping of the keyboard in the background. I am listening. Just often not to you. :-)

ComPiere is forked

I hadn't noticed this when it happened, but ComPiere was recently forked, as Frank Scavo notes in a detailed, excellent analysis. The fork came from a group of freelance ComPiere consultants that were apparently worried about NEA-funded Compiere's intentions, both present and future, as Frank notes:

1. The speed at which ComPiere Inc. processes fixes and enhancements submitted by contributors and the refusal, in some cases, to even accept them.
   
   
2. The refusal of ComPiere Inc. to provide Compiere version migration tools except in the sale of a support agreement.
   
   
3. Rumors that ComPiere Inc. is planning to limit the functionality of its open source offering, to better position some future proprietary offering.

Understandable from their side, but also from Compiere's. At the end of the day, Compiere has to own the roadmap, code, etc. They're the ones that are going to be hammered by customers if something goes wrong. It's a tradeoff one makes when going commercial open source. (Btw, Janke demolishes the notion that ComPiere, Inc. will be crippling the community project to enhance the viability of his company.

You can view the forked project here. It's called Adempiere. Lame name, but then, it's not supposed to be a marketable business. :-)

Oracle and the battle of the ecosystems

Josh Greenbaum at ZDNet suggests that the war of the ecosystems is on, and that Oracle is looking weak. I don't agree, but think Josh's commentary is interesting:

The partner front is the new flash point in the battle of the ecosystem. When it comes to IBM vs. Microsoft vs. SAP vs. Oracle, it turns out that a large coterie of happy, incented, and otherwise engaged partners that are out legitmizing an ecosystem vendor's ecosystem -– and selling the products and services they develop that fill in that ecosystem's white spaces - has become a major competitive weapon. And SAP is absolutely committed to making the most of this weapon in their four-way fight against their partner/competitors IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.

True enough, though I think each of the big ecosystem vendors is missing out on the most important partner for the future: open source.

Oracle is in a great position to become the center of that universe, but needs to act now. Instead, Josh suggests that Oracle has been MIA:

What about Oracle? In the run-up to their big Open World shindig next week - where we can expect to hear a lot of crowing about the solidification of their market position and their growing revenues from enterprise apps - the ecosystem play is still a glaring weakness. The buzz in the enterprise apps ISV community is clearly not about Oracle, despite that company's massive partner program. When you compare the IBM model - surround you with consultants, and maybe even buy you - and the SAP model - maybe invest in you and maybe buy you - and even the Microsoft model - we're Microsoft, wanna sell to 450 million desktops? - Oracle falls a little short.

It's not that Oracle lacks the technology, far from it. It's that they lack the focus on building a partner community with the same vim and vigor that the competition is applying to the problem. Sure, if you go to Open World, you'll see more partners - largely database and middleware partners - than you might see at any other show. But you won't see the clamor, the "partner with me" excitement, from the enterprise apps gang that you see in Oracle's competitors' ecosystems. Not yet, anyway.

I'm not sure it's fair to call out Oracle for not buying more partners, or offering them access to desktops (after all, Oracle does offer its partners and customers the world's market-leading database), or inundating them with pricey consultants. What Oracle could offer is the hub to an open source ecosystem.

Why Oracle? Well, for one thing, why not? But more pertinently, Oracle has been making noise around open source for some time, and has an executive that is both open to open source and shrewd about it. With one acquisition - Red Hat/JBoss - Oracle would effectively own the hub of the open source business community, and could use that to extend olive branches to the open source development community(ies), as well.

To compete in the battle of the ecosystems, you have to have a strong differentiator. Open source is the differentiator missing from every other ecosystem mentioned by Greenbaum. And if you read the tea leaves (or just listen to a few customers), it's not hard to see that it's where software is going. Fast.

So why not expedite the demise of your competitors, Oracle?

(Because if you don't, MySQL just might.)

Sun's little Blackbox

Jonathan Schwartz is talking up Sun's new Project Blackbox, and I have to say, it is cool. Not sure how successful it will ultimately be, but "datacenter-in-a-box" is a pretty nifty idea.

The coolest thing about it, however, is the intelligence that went into the size of the system. Fits into a standard shipping container. No, not a FedEx box.

The biggest thing we could build would ultimately be the biggest thing we could transport around the world - which turned out to be a standardized shipping container. Why? Because the world's transportation infrastructure has been optimized for doing exactly this - moving packets containers on rails, roads and at sea. Sure, we could move things that were bigger (see image), but that wasn't exactly a general purpose system.

So the question at hand became, "how big a computer can you build inside a shipping container?" And that's where the systems engineering started.

That's the sort of engineering challenge that tends to produce good technology - technology that fits human requirements, rather than fitting human requirements to technology. It's like Red Hat's business model - a product of necessity; something that no sane person would put themselves through unless necessity dictated it. But the end result is very cool.

Good luck with Blackbox, Sun. It will be interesting to see if it gets adopted, and for the same reasons you created it. I suspect that it may fill needs you didn't envision.

Bringing Web 2.0 appeal to stodgy enterprise applications (Coupa)

I'm working my way through a demo of Coupa, an open source enterprise procurement application. I met Noah Eisner, co-founder, at a recent Stanford dinner, and was intrigued to find open source creeping ever further into the dull world of enterprise software (in which I, too, live).

While at Novell, I used a procurement system similar to Coupa's. The core functionality is largely the same. But what I really like about Coupa is the useful, intuitive ways that it has added Web 2.0-like features into the system. (See below.)



This is not your grandfather's procurement system. Tags (which I've never used, but which Noah walked me through the purpose of - e.g., HP may not call its iPAQ a PDA, but normal people would, so tagging it as such allows it to be brought up when a user searches for "PDA" in the search box), user reviews (rather than forcing users to leave the application to go find them on Amazon or elsewhere), etc. It's a very comfortable UI. Probably needs to be built out even further, but that's happening.

I also like the fact this is something I can justify internally for a smaller company. $10,000 - $20,000, with larger implementations rising to maybe $75,000 - $100,000 (instead of $1,000,000+ for proprietary competitors). I'm willing to bet that Coupa is actually growing the eProcurement market, not cannibalizing an existing market. And, as I've said before, because of the support model, vendor and customer interests are aligned (Coupa makes money when its customers are happy).

Good work, Noah and team. The product feels great.

MySQL improves on its Community

MySQL today announced that it has become a truly community-driven company. This will sound funny to those of you that think MySQL announced its Enterprise product today. Yes, it did that. But the real news in MySQL's move is its efforts to continue to bolster its already vibrant community.

Savvy users and developers of open source software already know that community is in short supply - there simply is not a large global pool of developers that are anxiously waiting to contribute code to your (or my) project. Therefore, good community developers (and users) are golden, and companies and projects work hard to find them.

In MySQL's case, the company has had to worry about shipping a robust, IP-safe product to its community, which includes enterprises. For this reason, as well as the need for release cycle speed, MySQL must keep a tight rein on inbound contributions. Close to 100% of the contributions to JBoss, MySQL, etc. come from those companies, and not from community.

MySQL's Community Server product breaks down this centralization, providing "deposit slips" to a wide range of developers that have wanted to contribute code. Like Red Hat with Fedora, it gives MySQL and its community a safe but exciting platform on which to experiment with the latest and greatest database technologies. It will be Innovation Central for the MySQL database.

MySQL Enterprise? It's the frumpy dad that is less experimental, more dependable for mission-critical business use. For stability reasons, they will produce new binaries on regular basis with the latest bug fixes but without the latest new features. The source code, as ever, will be under the GPL.

One really cool thing in MySQL Enterprise - which Dave highlights - is the "MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Service". This service is partly based on add-on software to be installed at the customer's premise, partly based on rules that are provided from mysql.com. This network is similar to what Red Hat and JBoss offer - an easy way to plug into MySQL and extract continuous value. It's been under development for the past two years.

The Monitoring & Advisory service lets you see at a glance the health and status of all your MySQL Servers and includes more than 65 advisor rules to help with performance tuning, replication, security and other best practices. It's like a "virtual DBA assistant" who is an expert in MySQL looking over your shoulder and telling you where to spend your time. Since many MySQL users have a lot of servers the idea is to help make it easy for them to scale out to dozens or hundreds without having to hire tons of DBAs. (And it's also good in small shops where they don't have a full time resident MySQL guru.) The rules can be fully customized and new rules are delivered as part of the subscription.

In short, I think this is a huge move for MySQL. It lets them better focus both on their development community and on their enterprise customers. No small feat, but this is the right way to go about it.

Red Hat shares tumble on news of...competition???

It's amazing what will move Red Hat's stock. In case you missed it, Jefferies cut its target price on Red Hat's stock on news that (GASP!) Red Hat has competition. Now, granted, this alleged new competition is Oracle, and Oracle is a big company with excellent experience in Linux.

But let's be clear. There's more to open source than technology. It's not about flipping a switch and tomorrow you're a LInux vendor (or open source CRM vendor, or ... whatever you want). Competing strongly in open source requires a different mindset. It's a non-trivial task.

Having helped steer Novell into the open source market, I can state with absolute, unequivocal certainty that Oracle would struggle to compete with Red Hat. Not because Oracle is a dumb/bad/weak company. It's not. It's one of the best positioned companies to take advantage of open source.

But Linux would be a trial for Oracle, I think. Oracle is fantastic at squeezing money out of code it owns. It's a very different business to make a business on software one doesn't own, even if Oracle's license to maintenance revenue ratio is favorable to an open source move. And to the extent that Oracle doesn't care about the money associated with Linux, why wouldn't it just work with Ubuntu?

For further commentary, see Matthew Aslett's here.

Web 2.0: Cooler than thou, but more profitable? (ZDnet)

I really like Josh Greenbaum's thoughts over on his Enterprise Anti-Matter blog. He points to something we both find hugely lacking in many of the upstart competitors to the industry heavyweights:

Experience.

Much of the SaaS/Web 2.0/open source (gasp! Did I say that?) world seems oblivious to the fact that there are decades-old entrenched practices for buying and selling software. Those won't go away tomorrow. In fact, they probably never will go away, just as the ancient green screen continues to live on in enterprises everywhere.

Says Greenbaum:

What I find important to realize is that this EAM opportunity, whether or not it results in more revenues for IBM or for some of its many competitors, largely defies both SaaS and Web 2.0 thinking. The quantity and complexity of the multitude of interfaces that an EAM system would need to connect to, and the requirement that the reports and analysis that result be very specific to the individual company and its individual industry, pretty much rule out a SaaS offering. There's just too many moving parts, too little commodity functionality, too much damn complexity for a SaaS solution to be either truly usable by the customer and truly profitable for a vendor.

And Web/Office 2.0: I didn't spend nearly as much time at the recent Office 2.0 conference as I would have liked, but it's clear to me that the Web 2.0/Office 2.0 gang isn't really capable of tackling this kind of opportunity, at least today. Part of the reason is that the solution set has to come from a very deep well of industry-specific knowledge, something I find largely lacking in most of the Web 2.0 products I've seen to date. Technical knowledge abounds, and some serious paradigm-busting chops are to be found all over the Web 2.0/Office 2.0 world. But nerdly qualfications pale in comparison to the need for deep knowledge of how to create new innovation in specific vertical industries, and I have to admit I think it will take an IBM or an MRO Software or one of their many Enterprise 1.0 competitors to crack the code about what helps industries innovate at the core of their businesses.

There's a lot of interesting "stuff" in Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 - but the business model is still too focused on cooler-than-though showboating and not enough focused on meeting the big problems, like asset management, that bedevil companies today. Until it can meet this real-world challenge, Web/Office 2.0 will be great for the conference circuit, and not yet ready for the boardroom.

In short, perhaps boring old stuff like Enterprise Content Management, enterprise service buses (like Mule), procurement (like open source procurement vendor Coupa), etc. are the real world-changing thing in the short term. And perhaps mash-ups will be cool to look at for several more years, until they become equally useful to big, stodgy, boring Web 0.05 enterprises.

You know. The kind that spend billions every year on IT. The kind that represent 95% of the buyers out there.

So, maybe going forward the real mark of an exciting investment opportunity is how incredibly boring it sounds. If it puts a venture capitalist to sleep, invest BIG TIME!!!! :-)

Thoughts on the European Union Public License (EUPL)

There has been lots of talk over the past few years about open source license proliferation. I'm generally of the mind that if you can't solve the problem with the GPL, MPL, or BSD, it's not a licensing problem worth solving.

I've therefore been interested to watch the progress of the European Union Public License (Draft here). The EU has stated its rationale (which the Free Software Foundation doesn't buy), but let me one big reason of my own.

Whether you view it as a positive or negative, the GPL leaks like a sieve. It's very tight if you're dealing with traditional software delivery mechanisms, but not if you're delivering software over the 'Net. (This is why Yahoo and Google can build their companies on open source projects without releasing the changes they make to those projects.)

This is why Fabrizio introduced the Honest Public License. He was tired of companies (not developers) freeriding on his product - not giving back cash or code. One or the other drives open source, as Marten Mickos has said.) GPLv3 also closes this "ASP loophole," and likely for the same reason.

The problem is that it tries to impose a very narrow view on a very wide world. The Linux kernel developers don't like it, nor does Linus Torvalds I've been sanguine on GPLv3, but my opinion is fast changing. I think it tries far too hard to exercise control over...just about everything.

Which brings me back to the EUPL. I really like the way it closes the ASP loophole without closing off everything else, as well. It does this with one word: "communicate." Rather than talking about distribution or delivery of software, the EUPL is triggered by "communication" of that software, defined in the following way:

Distribution and/or Communication: any act of selling, giving, lending, renting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, or otherwise making available, on-line or off-line, copies of the Work at the disposal of any other physical or legal person.

Very clean. Very clear.

I also like the fact that the EUPL allows for attribution, which I think is important in the application/UI world (and much less so in the "headless" infrastructure world. It's related to droit morale, given that applications deal with the visual: the right of attribution and the right of integrity. If I make something that looks nice, and if you like it and extend it, I might want the downstream user to know that I contributed to your work. (Or I might not - perhaps I don't want you using my trademarks. But that's something the licensor can choose for herself, rather than having that right taken away by the GPL.)

You should check out the EUPL. It has its deficiencies, as all licenses do, but I appreciate the intent and the structure of the license. Please let me know what you think about it.

SIs: the new sales force?

I spent time with one of Alfresco's partners yesterday, and we were talking about our respective sales plans. Ours? Almost entirely inside sales. Theirs? Almost entirely direct sales. Same product. Same goal (make money). But different sales plans.

Why?

This partner told me that they generate 3-4X in professional services for every $1 in Alfresco software they sell. (In a big license proprietary world, the multiple would arguably be higher, because the lack of source code availability and the general clunkiness of the software just make it harder to modify to a customer's needs.) The big money is going to the partner, then, and not to us, allowing them to subsidize a direct sales force that works in our interest, anyway.

Both sides win.

An open source software company can't really afford to spend much time on RFPs. An open source SI that is hitched to successful open source software projects arguably can. Why? Again, they're making 3-4X (at least) on services, not including the sales royalty they get for selling the partner's product.

I think we're going to see more symbiosis between open source product and services companies down the road. Software providers will focus on providing the best software, and services companies will focus on providing the best services. Yes, I know that IBM et al are going the opposite direction, giving customers a one-stop shop. That's fine. That serves a particular kind of customer very well.

For the other 90%, though, there's open source. :-)

European Commission plugging open source

This just in via The Register:

The European Commission has taken steps to promote the use of open source systems and software in the public sector.

It has selected a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to create and manage the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR), the company announced....

They will provide an internet service and portal enabling European administrations to centrally store and share the software code of their open source applications and exchange open source knowledge. It is aimed at helping them improve the return on their IT investments and make their applications more interoperable.

OSOR will be a common repository where, in addition to the source and object code, information will be available regarding the use of applications, different software versions, open source licences and contract material. On the OSOR web portal, member states' administrations will also be able to share know-how about their different open source applications.

It's a really interesting proposition, similar to the Avalanche Project in the US (allowing enterprises to share code within a gated open source community) and the Government Open Code Collaborative (US government organizations sharing code amongst themselves).

As I once heard Peter Quinn (former CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) say, most governments do the same sorts of things. They collect taxes, issue license plates, etc. They're (generally) not competitive with each other - Rhode Island doesn't compete with Utah, and England (generally) doesn't compete with France (except in terms of mutual disdain :-). So why not share?

Open source...one of Microsoft's top competitive threats

You want to know what keeps Steve Ballmer up at night? Apparently, not specific competitors, but rather competitive industry trends that strike at the core of Microsoft's software license business model: open source, advertising, and software-under-the-guise-of-hardware. (Thanks to Brady for calling out the BW article.)

Ballmer says:

Who are Microsoft's top competitors?

Guys who can touch us in multiple places probably matter more than guys who can touch us in any one place. And actually we don't really have our big competition from any one company. Any one company, we know how to compete with. It's alternate business models that we will have to embrace or compete well with. You give me any enterprise software company, O.K., and I'll say c'mon. We know how to go do that. We do do that. And we're really pretty good at it. We haven't gotten any worse at it. Boom. Boom. Boom. We know how to keep coming.

[Take open source.] Open source is not a new technology area. It was a new business model. In the last three or four years, we have competed very well by extending our value. Open source never goes away as a business model or competitor. We have learned how to compete with open source, and we will compete with it for the rest of time. But competing with open source will have to be something that's burned bright on the foreheads of our senior people.

The second big competitive force is advertising as a business model. Typically, people just want to reduce that to Google, and if you want to do that, you can. But it's do we embrace advertising fully enough as a business model? Because at the end of the day, anybody who comes at you with a cheaper-to-the-customer proposition, you got to worry about. And advertising looks cheaper to a consumer than something you pay for.

In the case of open source, we couldn't adopt the business model. We adopted a competitive approach that so far has worked very well. In the advertising case, we can embrace that model. We don't have to sit here and say it's that bad.

A third model I could sit here and write down on this list is that there are cases where software gets monetized through hardware. That's what an iPod is. iPod is a software thing. You just happen to collect the money on the hardware. You could say in China and India, it's unclear whether classic software will get paid for as much as advertising, hardware, subscriptions, etc.

So our ability to embrace and benefit from or compete with new business models—and I would say ad-funded and open source, more than this hardware thing—is more the way to categorize the key competitive dynamic for us.

Fascinating stuff, and I'd encourage you to read the rest of the interview, too.

This isn't revolutionary stuff (Clay Christensen has been talking about how to disrupt an industry for some time), but it's interesting to hear the CEO of the world's largest software company candidly explaining how to beat Microsoft. As with open source code, just because you have "the answer" doesn't make it any easier to crack the code.

To disrupt a Microsoft product you have to cut off its traditional air supply. Open source is disruptive to Microsoft because it a) removes the one-size-fits-all approach that Microsoft imposes and b) the entry cost is $0. Microsoft knows how to disrupt with "free" (remember IE?), but it has yet to learn how to compete with someone else undercutting its prices by 100%.

Over the long haul, however, it's going to be modifiability that beats Microsoft. This will sound odd to many, because the common industry wisdom is that no one wants to modify anything. We just want to passively consume software. My experience at Alfresco and Lineo, however, has been the complete inverse of this received wisdom. Many users want their Firefox customized to them. Many enterprises want their ECM customized to them. Etc.

Microsoft has been good about enabling a robust partner ecosystem to extend its products. The question will be whether it can allow its customers, non-customers, and non-partners to do the same. I don't think it can, and I think that matters.

Ballmer on Web 2.0 and the importance of infrastructure

I'm still reading through BusinessWeek's interview with Steve Ballmer, and still fascinated. Love him or hate him, Ballmer is a smart guy.

Ballmer refused to call the YouTube valuation ($1.65B) overvalued. He rightly said that it depends on a lot of factors (factors, incidentally, that I don't personally think add up, but I'm willing to be wrong):

You're clear as a bell on the YouTube valuation…
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.

Really, even though there's no identifiable business model?
It is one of those things where you have to think. You can't punt either way. If you're asking me if I would offer $1.7 billion if no one else was offering $1.6 billion, no I wouldn't do that. On the other hand, if somebody is really going to offer that amount of money, you cannot reject these things. And I'm not saying that we are.

Take Facebook. Every month and a half, there's a rumor that it's going to get sold. What was the last rumor, a billion bucks? Is it worth a billion bucks? It hasn't proven to be worth a billion bucks. But it also hasn't refuted that it might be worth a billion bucks.

Look, there are only [a few] buyers who can buy anything over a billion dollars in this space. There's us. There's eBay (EBAY). There's Yahoo. And there's Google. I don't think there's anybody else. Even Amazon (AMZN) has a market cap of only $13 billion. I don't think they're going to do too many $1 billion deals. So you've got maybe four guys who will buy in that range. And there's the public market....

What do you think about Web 2.0 valuations?
There are hot companies, and there's everything else. The question is: What's the value of an eyeball? Take Facebook. If you knew for sure that you were going to have the kind of minutes of eyeball time on the percentage of college students that Facebook has today, for the next 15 years, it's an easy billion-dollar check to write, even though it doesn't have a business model that establishes it. If [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg is going to grow older, he's going to lose his hipness. The site is going to be replaced by Facebook Prime, you know, the guy will be old. Pretty soon, he'll be 25. It's not like it's so sticky. College students churn every four years anyway. If it's that, it's not worth anywhere close to a billion....

So, maybe the deal makes sense, but it seems like Ballmer is saying that it's only worth a lot if others are willing to pay a lot. Yes, that's how markets set prices, but it seems like he's following valuations, rather than setting them. Of course, he and everyone else is still trying to figure out how to value eyeballs in the Web 2.0 world. Which makes Web 2.0 sound a lot like Web 1.0 (and its associated Bubble 1.0).

More interesting in the interview is his take on infrastructure:

These are hits-based phenomena. Don't you and others have to monetize very rapidly before people shift onto something else?
If they are hits-based, which is the implication I've made here, and you pay a lot of money, you're going to have to move in, milk, and get out. Or, it may turn out that the money is in the infrastructure for these things. What is Google to MySpace? It's the advertising infrastructure. In some of these things, you'll have to decide, if you're the big guys: Do I want to play at the application level or do I merely want to play at the commerce and other platform level in a way that strengthens the rest of my assets and allows me to make money?

Which calls out a larger question: is infrastructure the big winner in Web 2.0 and in enterprise software, generally? Yes, Oracle has been buying big application companies for big bucks, and is arguably extremely well positioned to compete for every dollar spent by an enterprise, but the core of Oracle's strategy is its database. Infrastructure.

The most interesting open source play right now? Red Hat + JBoss. That platform will wield an increasing amount of clout.

It would be interesting to see how other open source infrastructure players deal with this. I can see a world where MySQL builds a constellation of applications around itself. I can even see (and perhaps am paid to see :-) an ecosystem around Alfresco, to provide an alternative to Microsoft's use of Sharepoint to serve as the hub of a new level of lock-in.

Infrastructure may matter more than applications, both in terms of Web 2.0 and in terms of open source. It is clearly the monetization engine for Web 2.0. Will it be the same for open source?

Eudora goes open source...(Are you still awake?)

It's finally happened. We've been waiting for this for years. Decades, really. It's about to happen. The BIG NEWS!!!!

Eudora is going open source.

What is Eudora, you ask? Good question. Eudora is a decent email client that I used up until 1998, when I realized I wanted an email client that had a modern UI (meaning, developed within the last 3,000 years, and not requiring chiseling of information into stone tablets). I moved to Microsoft's Outlook, and then to Microsoft's Entourage (which I still use, and still prefer to anything else on the market because I like a suite-based approach to my email/calendar/tasks/etc.).

Here's the news:

Qualcomm Inc. and Mozilla Corp. on Wednesday jointly announced that future versions of Eudora, Qualcomm's long-running e-mail client, would be based on Mozilla's open-source Thunderbird code. The move effectively puts an end to the proprietary Eudora, which launched in 1988 and once had a significant share of the e-mail software market.

Developers from both companies will work on Mozilla's e-mail project, which will feed to Eudora and Thunderbird. The first open-source Eudora will release during the first half of 2007, said the pair.

"I'm excited for Eudora to be returning to the open source community," said Steve Dorner, Qualcomm's vice president of technology for the Eudora Group, in a statement. "Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine."

My snarky comments aside, this actually might give Mozilla's Thunderbird project the developers it needs to really build out the open source project. It's not clear, however, that this is the intent. Qualcomm said:

"Qualcomm has decided not to remain in the e-mail market because it is not in alignment with the core business or strategic goals."

So, if this is the case, what, exactly, is Qualcomm going to do with Thunderbird? It sounds like it has dumped its code into the Thunderbird project so as to provide a convenient end-of-life for Eudora (and an upgrade path for its Eudora installed base).

In short, is Qualcomm just using Mozilla to dump some code it didn't want to make a business with? Sounds like it to me.

Red Hat hires Lenovo's channel guy

Red Hat is hell-bent on bulding up its already strong (but not necessarily ecstatic) channel, and just hired a great person to help them do it, as eWeek reports. Mark Enzweiler was VP of Global Channel Strategy at Lenovo.

Salesforce.com gets open source religion...sort of

The big news out of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce Conference this week is Apex. What's Apex? According to the press release, Apex is a

...breakthrough new multi-tenant programming language and platform, that will deliver the future of business applications. Apex will empower customers, partners and developers with the same language and platform that have allowed salesforce.com to build its industry-leading on-demand service. Apex code and applications will run on salesforce.com's service, freeing businesses for the first time from the burden of buying and deploying complex software infrastructure. With complete freedom to innovate, the ecosystem can create and run any application on demand with the security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease-of-use for which salesforce.com is best known. With Apex applications available through the AppExchange, customers will benefit from unprecedented choice and freedom across all types of business applications.

Marketing hype aside, Apex is Salesforce.com's response to open source.

Nick thinks it's big news, and I do, too. It's big because it offers customers a way to customize hosted applications, rather than running them "as is." The myth has been that companies don't want to customize software. The reality is that they emphatically do. Salesforce.com's traditional customer base (SMEs) did not. Its big Fortune 500 companies definitely do.

Dan Farber cites Mark Gorenberg's opinion on this, suggesting its the coolest thing since sliced bread. Well, it is big, but it's not that big. It would be even bigger if Salesforce.com would just take the final step and open source its platform. They're getting there:

Apex will dramatically expand the universe of applications that can be created and run on demand. Apex will run completely on salesforce.com's service, eliminating the need for operating systems, databases, application and Web servers, data centers or other infrastructure requirements. Code created, run and stored with Apex will be 100 percent multi-tenant and encapsulated to protect customer implementations against faulty code, and automatically upgraded in conjunction with the salesforce.com service.

Customers will be able to use Apex to customize the core features and functionality of their Salesforce deployments for their unique business needs. Apex will give customers the power to reprogram any component of Salesforce, such as Campaigns, Cases or Opportunities, or build entirely new components completely from scratch.

Perhaps it's too risky to allow someone to tweak a hosted application - what if it breaks? But that's always the risk. And open source's track record has shown that the rewards far exceed the risks.

So come on, Marc. Take the next step. Put Salesforce.com up on Sourceforge. :-)

YouTube and open source money-making

For those who wonder how open source will ever make enough money to justify itself, I suggest you take a look at the Web 2.0 world, where making money is an afterthought. Evidence for the prosecution will start with Google's acquisition of YouTube.

I like YouTube. Whenever an Arsenal game isn't televised, I know that a few hours after the game some fellow lunatic will have posted the goals on YouTube (or Google Video). I find bliss (or utter despair) in YouTube.

More useful, perhaps, is the increasing use of YouTube in political campaigns, as the WSJ reported yesterday. You send a young staffer around to catch the opposition in foolish statements, impolitic gestures, etc. Then you ruin their lives with it. Very thoughtful.

What I find interesting in YouTube and, indeed, in the whole Web 2.0 world, is the complete lack of concern for money. Meaning, how you make any of it. YouTube is a cash monster - it requires huge amounts of cash to serve up all of that free video. Of course, in the Web 2.0 world, the answer to the once terrible business model question is a pseudo pithy "advertising."

In Web 2.0 land, the word "advertising" covers a multitude of business model sins.

Oh, that it were so in open source!

You see, in open source we actually went through the revenue model silliness years ago. It used to be that all you had to say was "support," and that seemed to be an adequate answer to all of the questions around horribly fractured business models. But it doesn't work anymore. You actually have to make money as an open source company now, or you're cut adrift by your VCs and prospective customers. No one believes in "advertising"-like panaceas in open source anymore. Or few do, and those that do are quickly punished for their investments.

At some point, the Web 2.0 world will discover what we open sourcerors learned some time ago: someone has to pay. There is no such thing as free video. Maybe advertising wil be the holy grail. Maybe. But just as support was not the answer for open source (or, rather, that unadorned support was not the answer), so, too, will Web 2.0 need to innovate business models around advertising that appreciate the value of advertising without denigrating the "free" experience.

We'll see how well they do.

Jeff Nolan's 95 Theses

Jeff Nolan recently left SAP, but tacked the door with his own version of Martin Luther's 95 Theses on the way out. Here's a few that I find particularly insightful/poignant:

1. Direct enterprise selling sucks, is highly inefficient, and makes you do unnatural things in your product strategy in order to drive higher deal sizes
   
   
2. Large enterprise software vendors are not the future. The whack-a-mole selling model where a handful of vendors (172 public companies in hardware and software) are fighting it out over approximately 50,000 business customers just can’t be the future! There are 38 million businesses in the U.S. alone that have less than 10 employees, there just has to be a way to grow our collective markets by appealing to these business users and I’m pretty confident in saying that it isn’t going to come from SAP, Oracle, or IBM.
   
   
3. The SOA-ification of big enterprise products has attacked a technical dimension, not an economic or business model one. In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, the historical strength of market leading business applications, the integrated suite approach, is being turned from an advantage into a liability. It’s like if you went into the Gap and wanted to buy a pair of jeans but because of the way the Gap was structured and how they merchandised, they would only sell you a pair of jeans, socks, underwear, shirt, jacket, and a hat… and when you told the salesperson that you just wanted a pair of jeans they said “but we are selling you a pair of jeans”.

Preach on, Jeff. Welcome to the wonderful world of sanity. You tend to experience it more fully outside big proprietary vendors and, oddly enough, the more time you spend with customers.

Oracle still has a healthy appetite

Vishal Bhagwati, a VP in Oracle's M&A group, has stated the obvious: Oracle is going to buy more companies. Lots more companies. ZDNet notes:

...[Bhagwati] sees potential for so-called "tuck-in" deals to beef up the software maker's offerings, especially in the areas of security and business intelligence applications.

He also said the company would hopefully keep up a pace of closing three or four deals per quarter, with most takeovers likely falling in the range of $5 million to $100 million. Still, big deals remain on the table, he said.

What I find most interesting in this is the size of the deals. Pretty small by comparison to the PeopleSoft-like acquisitions of yore ("yore" is loosly defined as "the last two years" :-).

Off-topic: How can you write a book about that?

I just saw that Materazzi is coming out with a book. About the infamous head butt. About what he really told Zidane.

An entire book about a half-second head butt.

Even stranger, people will likely pay the ~$10 to buy it. The world really is crazy.

Them sales guys just don't get it

I get emails and calls all the time from salespeople (usually from my company's competitors) looking for a job. They're watching the ground drop out from under them as open source infilitrates their accounts and starts nudging them out. Salespeople go where the money is, so they're calling me (and my colleagues at MySQL, Red Hat, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, etc.).

One call last Thursday was particularly funny. He was perplexed by how we make money, given how low our prices are.

"How do you stay in business without more direct salespeople like me?" he asked.

My response?

Specifically because we don't have more expensive sales people like him. :-)

Verbal one-upmanship aside, these conversations tend to confirm my belief that the proprietary world still doesn't grok just what deep potty it's in. (I have four kids, so I can say the word "potty" without embarrassment.) Open source companies migrate to bigger deal sizes over time as their brand and infrastructure scale to support them, but any business that requires an upfront license fee of $1M to survive is dead. The days of the proprietary gravy train are gone.

If you don't believe me please email me the name of your company, as I would like to start an open source competitor after Alfresco so that I can put you out of business. Your customers deserve better.

BEA: Open source doesn't build software customers want

As noted by OSDir and originally reported by ComputerWorld, BEA still has nary a clue about open source. Well, that's not exactly what ComputerWorld reported, but it's rather the essence of what BEA said:

“The community builds what it thinks is good, but it is not always the same as what the customer thinks is good."

I remember saying something like that circa 2000, but I thought that goofy notion went out with spandex. (That said, I did see a woman wearing spandex at my son's soccer game on Saturday. It was frightening.)

Instead of a pure open source model, BEA has taken an oh-so-clever mixed source approach, as Richard Levy, BEA's CTO says:

BEA has adopted what it calls a “blended strategy” on open source. It has put products in open source, to take advantage of the innovation that comes from community development, and also supports open source technologies like Spring and Hibernate on its own products, Levy says.

So, when it wants innovation, it uses open source. When it wants lame code, it writes its own? ;-)

Note to BEA: You might want to ask Novell about how successful the hybrid approach has been against Red Hat in the Linux market. About as well as it will work in the application server market. (You may not have gotten the memo, but Red Hat is full throttle on creating and giving away innovation. It's hard to compete with that.)

In fact, looking over the past five years, you haven't:



You're just now getting back to where you were years ago. Now here's Red Hat:



Looks like nothing but growth to me.

I know how hard it is to compete with open source. It's even harder to embrace it and have that change ripple through one's company. (Remember, I was part of the team that brought open source to Novell.) But it's a necessary move. BEA makes great technology, but you will never win against open source in the medium to long term. And with a large player behind JBoss Application Server, I think you may find the short-term is increasingly uncomfortable, as well.

Can open source learn from Microsoft? Mozilla thinks so

We open sourcerors are fond of poking fun of Microsoft. Blue Screen of Death, bugs galore, etc. I guess the biggest software company on the planet is ripe for abuse.

But in an interesting post from TechWeb, it appears that some within the open source community actually think there might be something to be learned from the Great Satan.

Mozilla developers who spent several days this week with the Windows Vista team at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus said that they're considering implementing a security feature in the upcoming OS to better protect future versions of Firefox from attack.

Vladimir Vukievi, who was one of the Mozilla team to take up Microsoft's August offer of Vista assistance, said that Vista's "Low Integrity Mode" might make Firefox less susceptible to exploits....

"We spent a while talking to members of both the UAC team and the IE team about ideas on how to structure our app for the lowest permission level," wrote Vukievi on his blog. "I have some ideas on how we could do this in a cross-platform way, taking advantage of UAC on Vista, and dropping privileges on Linux/Mac OS."

Vukievi said that Mozilla's developers will consider if this is possible for the next major version of Firefox, v. 3.0, which is currently on the planning board for a 2007 release. "I think that it would force us to evaluate exactly where the browser touches the rest of the system, and to figure out how to tighten the security around those interactions," he added.

Does the open source world have anything to learn from Microsoft? Of course. No one delivers more software to such a massive population of users. Because of this, no one else understands as well the difficulties of meeting a wide variety of needs while still delivering solid functionality, security, etc.

Does Microsoft do things perfectly? No, which is why it needs to learn from open source, too. But I'm glad to see this two-way street. SugarCRM, MySQL, JBoss, and others have made the trip to Redmond to work on technical integration. I'm glad to see the FireFox team doing the same. Open source software will get better through this interaction, as will Microsoft software.

Firefox kicking IE

TechWeb is reporting that the reports of IE's death are not grossly exaggerated. In fact, it's looking like a matter of time before it capitulates and fades into a blue phishing attack of death.

Firefox accounted for 12.5 percent of September's global browser market, said Aliso Viejo, Calif.'s Net Applications. That's an increase from August's 11.8 percent, which was up from the 11.3 percent in July. Internet Explorer's share slipped to 82.1 percent in September, down from August's 83 percent.

Also making gains was Apple Computer's Safari browser, which by the end of September was up from 3.2 percent to 3.5 percent. Safari's September numbers were its highest since April.

"Internet Explorer continues to lose market share with Firefox and Safari showing a steady increase over the past 9 months," said Net Applications in a statement.

So, IE isn't going to die tomorrow, but to the extent that consumers actually exercise choice, it will continue to lose ground. Microsoft's best hope is that people will not think and will just use whatever their computer's default is.

It's pretty firm ground, yes, but I'd be ashamed to work for a company that has to rely on ignorance to persist.

That said, one thing I like about Microsoft (Yes, in case you forgot, I'm the resident Microsoft apologist) is that it fights hard in other areas. In the enterprise market, Linux continues its oedipal drive to kill off its Unix father, but has yet to tackle the growing Windows market.

In databases, too, Microsoft is doing well. Same with content management. So, Microsoft hasn't given up on competing.

But it does seem to have a hard time competing with free. Once a product "grows up" to require a fee, Microsoft knows what to do. But free? That strategy strikes too close to home.

Back to the Valley

In case anyone had forgotten, Silicon Valley is still the hot place to be if you're a technology startup, as the WSJ opines today. It just doesn't seem to matter how expensive the place is because of the deep talent pool:

Moving to Silicon Valley has its complications. The cost of doing business in the area remains steep, particularly due to high labor costs. According to a recent report from the American Electronics Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley, high-tech workers in San Jose, Calif., made an average annual wage of $126,700 in 2004, the last year for which data are available. That compares with the national average for high-tech workers of $72,400.

Even with these higher costs, start-ups say they have little choice but to go where the most tech talent is concentrated. San Jose, the self-styled Capital of Silicon Valley, boasts 284 tech workers per 1,000 people, compared with the national average of 51 tech workers per 1,000 people, according to the electronics association report.

Mr. Efrusy says the region, home to big Internet firms such as Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc., is also one of the few places where it's possible to recruit seasoned Internet executives.

Kevin's comment is very telling. I think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is the center of the universe for a certain type of talent, the kind that doesn't require interaction with normal human beings: semiconductors and the Internet. (I'll be chided for that last one, but have you seen the goofy Web 2.0 rubbish that has been funded recently? No one outside the Valley would think of using it. More on that below.)

But the Valley, so the folklore goes, is different. Which may be why Aaron Levie (age 21), CEO of Box.net, may be dead-on:

"We tried to do some fund raising when we were based in Seattle, but Silicon Valley [venture] firms are just more receptive to younger entrepreneurs."

Heaven forbid that VCs should require a little experience, much less a modicum of common sense. Box.net? It does online file storage, like many a failed startup before it. Would I have funded it? Not a chance. I'm glad, however, that Silicon Valley VCs were able to see past Levie's youth and the company's poor idea. It's comforting, really.

I've argued before that open source companies need not bow down before The Valley. Most of the successful ones don't. As I've written before, a large majority of successful open source companies come from outside the Valley, and most of them from Europe. Something about socialism.... :-)

Anyway, this isn't meant to be too hard on Silicon Valley. I lived there for many happy years, and remember being surprised when I left that there were people on the earth who didn't think of technology all day.

Now I live amongst those people. I did some tech support for a neighbor the other night. He wanted help figuring out his networking settings in Virtual PC (He, wise beyond his 40+ years, uses a Mac). While I was there, I showed him some of the cool features in Safari (tabbed browsing) and OS X (Expose). He was impressed for a moment, then just went back to browsing of Web 0.2 sites with only one tab per window open.

He, like 99% of the world's population, doesn't really care about technology for technology's sake. He's a doctor. The computer is an occasional resource, not his lifeblood. Oddly enough, most people are like him. These "most people" just don't happen to live in the Valley. I'd encourage you to meet them sometime. Hopefully, it will affect the kinds of businesses you build. Now that would be innovative.

(All that said, it is true that it's easier to get press and funding in the Valley. Unfortunately, neither venture money nor media is a good substitute for a sound business plan and even sounder execution. For these, I'm not sure Silicon Valley is the answer. Spending time with paying customers is. Hint: Unless you're selling semiconductors or living in an Internet bubble, real customers live outside the Valley. Nearly all of them, in fact.)

Open source "so expensive?"

Slashdot carried a story earlier today entitled "Why Is Commercial OSS So Expensive?" He was referring to embedded software, and his experience is 100% contrary to my own experience. (My background is in open source embedded software.) He says:

Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock....After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore.

Taking the author at his word - that commercial open source is, in fact, expensive (has he tried the alternatives?) - I think he's asking the wrong question. Given that in his world the open source alternatives are actually better than their proprietary counterparts, his question really should be, "Why isn't it more expensive?"

It surprises me that some people persist in wanting something for nothing, or next to nothing. Open source is about a superior software development and distribution methodology. It really has nothing to do with cost.

Today, it's much cheaper. SugarCRM? A fraction of the cost of Salesforce.com, Siebel, etc. MySQL? Pennies on the Oracle dollar.

But maybe not forever. If in five years MySQL ends up being more expensive than Oracle (not sure how Marten and crew could find ways to jack up the price that much, but let's assume he's very creative :-), it won't be for any other reason than the market will bear that price. And why would the market bear such price inflation?

Because it's better software.

So, to the author of the article above, let me suggest that his projected switch to VxWorks or WinCE may get him exactly what he pays for:

Less.

PostPath 2.0 releases

I've been bullish on PostPath for some time. I like the management team, like the investors, and like the idea: Exchange replacement at a fraction of the cost and a boost in the functionality.

What's not to love?

Well, PostPath just got better. Duncan Greatwood, the CEO and someone I've known since his Virata (and my Lineo) days, just sent me an update. With his permission, here's what they just released in PostPath 2.0:

We’ve finished porting the Zimbra web UI to PostPath’s backend. So now you get the open-source Zimbra web client – but seamlessly interoperable with mixed Exchange and PostPath environment.

[Matt note: This is one of the great things about open source, and at times the most frustrating as a vendor. Zimbra's web client is fantastic and open source, allowing PostPath to marry excellent Zimbra technology with its own excellent server. Very cool. Not sure how Zimbra feels about it, but imitation (or adoption?) is the sincerest form of flattery....]

For instance, you can pull up the Active Directory global address list from the Zimbra client.

And you can pull up free/busy for users on Exchange, and users on PostPath, all from the Zimbra web-client.

In other words, now you can take an AJAX / web 2.0 app and use it in a mixed enterprise environment. Isn’t that’s what’s needed to actually make web 2.0 an enterprise reality?

Other cool stuff includes being able to do automated failover – on or off-site – without having to use any proprietary components. We just use DRBD and Linux-HA, both normal Linux components, and they give us on- or off-site redundancy and DR.

Of course, we’re still the only ones with drop-in compatibility with Outlook, Exchange, A.D., and ecosystem apps like Blackberry.

Very cool stuff. If you want to see a demo of some of it, check it out here.

Good work, Duncan and team.

Putting risk back on the vendor, not the customer

I'm in the middle of doing a podcast with Dave Dargo, CTO of Ingres (and a friend of several years). Dave just made an interesting point:

Proprietary software puts the risk of acquisition firmly on the customer (caveat emptor), whereas open source puts the risk of acquisition firmly on the vendor.

What does he mean?

If you're an enterprise customer and you buy from a proprietary vendor, you pay a big upfront license fee. You do this without having any real hands-on experience with the software you're buying. You buy on faith.

Interestingly, you also pay a huge amount to have that sales guy sitting in your office. On average, proprietary enterprise vendors spend 5-10x more on sales and marketing than they do on R&D. I'm sure buyers like to have lunch with their sales guy, but wouldn't they rather have a product that actually works?

Back to faith. In open source, risk shifts to the vendor, because there is no upfront license fee, just the ongoing support and maintenance. As such, if the open source vendor fails to deliver ongoing value, you dump them. Period. And if the product is great but the support is not, you can go to one of their SIs or others to get support.

Yes, this puts a lot of risk on open source vendors. No, it's not easy. But yes, it is a dramatically better value proposition for enterprise buyers. No question.

Enterprises should stop paying Monopoly Money (licenses) to vendors. They should pay for value, not licenses.

Yahoo! Mail opens up

I recently took Yahoo! to task (and Google) for not being a better open source citizen. Well, the company just donned its hairshirt and is making strides toward full repentance.

Over the weekend, the company announced it is open sourcing much of its cool Mail program (the remnants of its Oddpost acquisition). The hope is that developers will build the Yahoo! Mail service into other applications, and to extend the Mail service with cool new applications. This is a huge open source move, one that will benefit developers and Yahoo! alike. A very bold, smart move.

See, Jeremy, you guys really can be better open source citizens. :-)

Now when will Google follow suit?

My very own corner of Apple Hell

Yes, I am a Mac bigot. But it's never been so painful to a faithful Mac-head.

A month ago, my Mac started eating my power supplies. Whatever I plugged into my PowerBook G4, that machine destroyed. $600+ worth of power supplies. In fact, Apple's support technician asked me to go buy a new Apple power supply so that I could prove that the Mac destroyed Apple power supplies, and not just everything else. Grr....

I took it to the Apple Store in London, where Francesco (I think that was his name) very nicely helped me out and took my laptop. A few days and a ProCare membership - roughly $150 - later (so as to expedite my repair so I could leave the country with my Mac when I returned to the US), I had my Mac back.

Well, at least until I returned. Then, almost immediately, my Mac started to make terrible sounds. Like the Shrieking Shack in the Harry Potter novels. I called Apple (I have the AppleCare Protection Plan) and they very nicely asked me to send back my Mac. A few days passed, and then I had my Mac back again.

Until the next day, when I noticed that the WiFi no longer worked (or, rather, worked weakly and very sporadically). I called Apple Support and was walked through a few procedures that didn't work, and gave up. I called my local Mac service center (MacDocs), and they took the Mac off my hands.

But not before they pointed out that my laptop was missing all the screws on one side, and one of the four screws on the bottom. Yep: Apple sent back my machine basically screw-less. How thoughtful.

Today I heard from MacDocs. They have to replace the top cover of my machine, as that's where the antenna is. They also have to replace the casing around the keyboard, because...well, I don't know why. They're hoping it's the antenna and not the AirPort card because the AirPort cards are backordered....

I called Apple to get replacement screws sent to me. Their response? Absolutely, but I'd have to send my laptop in so that they could replace them for me. There's not a chance that I'll send my machine back to them. They've already had it for the past month, not to mention the month-plus Apple had it back in January/February when I had problems the first time (ultimately resulting in a complete replacement of my machine). So they're making me pay $10+ for the screws....Amazing.

So, Apple. I have a small request for you. Back in February you offered me a new MacBook to replace my PowerBook. I opted for a replacement PowerBook.

I made a mistake. Your replacement is not working. I've mostly been without my laptop for a month. I'm ready to take you up on your previous offer. I didn't want the MacBook Pro then. I do now. Please give me something that works. Continuously.

You know where to contact me. I have an AppleCare protection plan. I'm in your address book.

Interview with Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens

I was very fortunate to talk today with Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of Red Hat as the "Dell of software," as Tim O'Reilly has opined. Or is this a trap at all?

I asked Brian this and other questions. Here are my questions and my best efforts to capture his responses. I wasn't able to record the conversation, so please pardon any errors I make in my live transcription of the conversation.

Red Hat is somewhat anomalous as a technology company, and even as an open source technology company, in that you don't own most of the code you ship, and you don't employ most of the engineers who "work" for you. Given this, what do you do as CTO?

Red Hat now employs roughly 2000 people in the company, 600+ of which are engineers. Unlike in the past, those engineers are not exclusively or even predominately focused on "sustaining" technology. They're focused on innovation.

Our approach, then, to the type of development talent that we need is largely no different from the proprietary technology companies. We need people that can help us drive the open source technology forward, and then support it. We're no longer a pureplay "packager" of technology, but are actually innovating new code/technology.

Where we differ from a proprietary software company - and differ significantly, is in our model of development. Our development model is open. We put our 600+ engineers out in the open in the open source development community, where they are known for the code they write, not the company they work for. Ownership of the code isn't what drives us - creation of compelling new technology drives us. Our business model allows us to give away the code, deliver strong customer value, and still make money in the process.

It's technology tied to business strategy. It's a two-way street, too. The SLA [service level agreement] with Red Hat doesn't begin when a customer has a support issue. It begins when the customer helps drive the direction of the development in the first place. Our customers are co-creators with us, and that's the "ownership" we need to drive our business.

Do you think the Red Hat model would apply equally well to other areas of software?

Red Hat's model works because of the complexity of the technology we work with. An operating platform has a lot of moving parts, and customers are willing to pay to be insulated from that complexity.

I don't think you can take one finite element - like Apache - and make a business out of it [using our model]. You need product complexity.

So, does the Red Hat model lend itself well to JBoss' application server? Was that part of the decision calculus for the acquisition?

Absolutely. It satisfied that litmus test for us. Plus, it helped that JBoss' business model was aligned with ours - taking a proprietary product and opening it up would not have worked as smoothly as our integration with JBoss has. It's one thing to merge a few bits, but quite another (and arguably more difficult) to merge a drastically different business methodology and culture.

Tell me about Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group.

In 2001, when I joined Red Hat and built the enterprise engineering team, we weren't being as aggressive as we could have been about driving innovation in open source. We were mostly packaging existing open source software. We wanted to change that. So, we formed the Emerging Technologies group to to bring "future technology" to customers through open source.

Our focus areas include:

• Real-time
  
• Messaging
  
• Management
  
• Virtualization (Xen)

We're working to drive innovation in these four areas, in particular, to enhance our customers' experience with open source enterprise infrastructure.

How has this focus on innovation changed the company?

It's changed the culture in a very positive way. We have engineers who don't just want to find bugs - they want to define technology direction for the industry. Our focus on innovation has enabled engineers to find their "niche" within the company, whether in innovative or sustaining technology.

It's also enabled us to more aggressively drive value for our customers. We're no longer just leading in open source business thinking, but also in technology. We love that.

What is your biggest frustration with the open source model? Do you ever feel limited by what the company can deliver?

I was one of the architects at DEC for roughly 15 years, and our pace of innovation there was very slow compared to Red Hat. Code ownership doesn't seem to accelerate innovation, and probably inhibits it. I'm very happy with the open source development model, at least the way we practice it.

Which open source projects/technologies do you think Red Hat is best positioned to help improve, and which are most exciting to you?

The $100 PC is hugely exciting. We're getting to really change the way we think about a PC - these machines are flash memory-based with mesh networking, among other things. A very different machine from the PCs that sit on the desktops in the United States. We think this project will bleed into other markets, beyond just emerging ones, and technology. Again, this puts Red Hat on the vanguard of not just the "Linux desktop," but the desktop, period. That's very exciting.

Virtualization is huge, but largely untapped. VMware is fantastic but not as pervasive as it should be. Xen can drive virtualization to ubiquity. Xen will make SOA, grids, etc. real.

The last thing is AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). [Brian then launched into an explanation of why it's cool, but he lost me. One interesting thing to me is that Red Hat has chosen to go for an Apache license with this, specifically so that it can be a pervasive messaging system, and not just "the open source messaging system."]

Red Hat on the desktop....I haven't heard much from Red Hat about the Linux desktop in a long time. Is it a focus for the company? If not, why not?

We think that the $100 PC is the best place for us to invest our desktop innovation dollars. It's the right thing to do because it opens up computer/Internet access to a huge group of people previously priced out of the market.

We also think it's the best way to disrupt Windows on the desktop. Having said that, we aren't trying to build a Windows clone. We're looking for fundamental ways to rethink the PC, and this disruption in terms of cost and technology is much more interesting than just doing another desktop OS. We want to completely change the paradigm of desktop computing. Again, we aim to be a technology leader, not a follower. The $100 PC helps us to do just that by forcing us to fundamentally rethink and retool the software for the PC.

How important is price to Red Hat's customers? Put another way, are you still slogging through the "Linux is cheaper than Windows is cheaper than Linux" TCO debate?

I don't see that. Cost matters to the CIOs I talk with, but usually it's the cost of deployment, under-utilization of software and hardware, manageability, etc. It's not the software licensing cost that most concerns them.

Our job, then, is not to re-create existing proprietary technology, but rather to enable IT to either dramatically lower costs, or to do things they've never been able to do before. We focus a lot on the latter opportunity, but also consistently drive costs lower through better manageability, virtualization, etc. We're the best value for a CIO's money, no question. CIO Insight honored us as such, two years running.

With the JBoss acquisition, Red Hat now has a robust stack: operating system + middleware. What's next? Applications?

For the foreseeable future, Red Hat will be focusing on the infrastructure elements of the software stack. Management, messaging, high availability, SOA, etc. It's a pretty big swath for us, and 99% of what we're hearing from our customers has to do with infrastructure. The better we can make it run for our customers, the happier they'll be.

What was the hardest thing, from a technology perspective, about the JBoss acquisition?

For the most part, there wasn't a lot of overlap between the two technology bases. JBoss sees things from the top-down (application layer), and we see things from the bottom-up (operating system), which differing perspectives have really helped us. So, the technology integration was actually quite seamless.

We assumed that integration of engineering teams would be the more difficult task, and were actually pleasantly surprised to find the teams gelling together quite well. We originally planned to have JBoss work as a separate division, but there was so much cross-pollenization that it quickly became clear that a tighter integration made more sense, and was culturally appealing to both sides.

Prior to the Red Hat acquisition, JBoss was developing (or talking about developing) all sorts of new extensions to its core application server product: an Enterprise Service Bus, content management system, portal, etc. How will Red Hat's ownership of JBoss change the JBoss product plans?

We're basically uniting our efforts around Red Hat's strategic technology direction: building the best platform and infrastructure on which to run applications, with some emphasis on Real-time, Messaging, Manageability, and Virtualization. There are some differences, of course - JBoss needs cross-platform support (though we want to make sure we improve our RHEL product to ensure JBoss runs fastest with enterprise Linux). But the two companies' visions were basically aligned.

Do you think Red Hat will ever get into the application space?

Not particularly. We create the best platform on which applications can run and compete with each other. That's our business.

Tell the truth: Do you wish you had a Mac?

No, because I already have two. I have a Mini at home and a core duo laptop sitting on my floor. I dual-boot on my PowerPC-based Mini and use Parallels on my Intel-based laptop. You actually can see a lot of Macs within Red Hat.

I knew there was a good reason I like Red Hat so much. :-)

MuleSource finally launches

I've been wanting to blog this for, oh, six months or so, but Dave has been pretty cagey about letting the news out. As of today, however, it's official: MuleSource has launched, and there's a nifty Q&A about the company/product/launch over on my InfoWorld blog.

Dave, my InfoWorld blogging partner, is the CEO. He did a Q&A with himself (yes, it's weird) for the launch. Here are two of the more pertinent questions/answers:

Just what is Mule?
Mule is the leading open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and integration platform. Mule has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is in production at more than 100 companies and governments worldwide.

The open source Mule project was founded in 2003 by Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource Inc. Frustrated by integration "donkey work" Ross set out to create a new platform that emphasized ease of development and re-use of components. He started the Mule project to bring a modern approach, one of assembly, rather than repetitive coding, to developers worldwide.

How do people use Mule?
There are three main use cases:

1. Enterprise Backbone passing a very high number of transactions (we know of one bank doing 1 million transactions a day.) In this instance people tend to use Mule with JMS and MQ Series

2. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-- ESB is generally defined as "distributed synchronous or asynchronous messaging middleware that provides secure interoperability between enterprise applications via XML, Web services interfaces and standardized rules-based routing of documents."

3. SMuT Stack (Spring, Mule, Tomcat)-When we first started doing due diligence we repeatedly came across the unfortunately named SMuT stack. Many people figured out that you could use the SMuT stack to create a lightweight app server.

Mule is widely used in a range of industries. MuleSource's customer list reads like a "Who's Who?" of the Fortune 500. It's a great product, and Dave and Ross are well-poised to conquer the ESB world.

And yes, I do think Dave copied Alfresco's website template when making MuleSource's.

Top 10 geek myths about business

First time I've come across Rondam Ramblings, but this first post is a winner.

I especially like his Myth #3:

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it's too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don't have any brains then it doesn't matter what they do.)

Patent protection does serve one useful purpose: it can make investors feel warm and fuzzy, especially naive investors. But I strongly recommend that you do your own patent filings. It's not hard to do once you learn how (get the Nolo Press book "Patent it Yourself"). You'll do a better job than most patent attorneys and save yourself a lot of money.

Agreed. Mike Moritz of Sequoia once said it even more concisely: "Lots and lots of customers probably afford your business better protection than a few patents."

From inside sales to direct sales: When?

This is just a hypothesis at this point, but my experience with Lineo, Novell, Alfresco, and the companies I advise is pushing me toward the following:

An open source company's sales model should be "low-touch" until the point that companies are buying your product more for its intrinsic qualities than because it's cheap/open source.

I need to figure out a more concise way of saying that, but wanted to get it up on the web so that others could see if it matches up with their experience.

The thought behind that statement is this: When companies are willing to pay parity or a premium for your product, it means they're no longer primarily interested in you because you're open source. Some companies will download your product solely because it's open source. They may initially be interested because they think they want an open source widget, and your product fits that bill. For such interest, a low-touch, inside sales approach is best.

Once prospective buyers think of you less in terms of open source, and more in terms of product quality and innovation (as, I think, has happened with Red Hat and is increasingly happening with MySQL and others), it's probably time to start scaling up a direct sales force. At that point, the fact that one's product is open source remains an advantage and is very important, but buyers care more about the fact that its performance and functionality is better.

Your field sales team won't be wasting time talking about open source risks (which is a very silly FUD tactic, anyway), maturity of the product, etc. They'll spend time talking to prospects that already know about the product and want to buy it.

Before that inflection point, I think direct sales people are an expensive, inefficient way to sell into a market. Afterwards, it's probably necessary to achieve strong growth.

The parable of the open source sower

Yesterday was Sunday, but apparently I have yet to shake the Bible ringing in my ears. :-)

Waking up today, I was reminded of one of my favorite parables. I've been thinking a lot about the open source sales process recently, and this parable seems perfectly on point.

5 A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.
6 And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture.
7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it.
8 And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. (Luke 8:5-8)

If you'd like to read the Biblical interpretation of the parable, read verses 11-15.

But if you want the open source version, read on.

Open source is as much about business model as it is about development model. The open source sales process works because it's a highly efficient way to get the seed closest to those ready and willing to hear it. (In Biblical terms, the "good ground.")

The traditional enterprise sales process plows through acres of thorns (Naysayers and others within an IT organization ready to pounce on a proposed solution and kill its consideration). Miles of rock (IT organizations that have already made a purchasing decision or who don't have budget to make one in the near future). Or skies filled with birds (Um, my analogy just ran out :-).

Open source gets downloaded by those who already have an interest in the product. It grows up, sheltered from initial budget, personnel, etc. restraints. People evaluate it on their own schedule, and subject to their own agenda. If it works, the IT group is able to show a growing (or fully grown, in some cases) "plant," rather than a packaged seed ("Guys, the vendor promised me this would work. No, he wouldn't show me any samples, and no, we can't touch it until we buy it, but he's such a nice sales guy....").

That's the beauty (or one beauty) of open source.

I'm constantly surprised by how efficient it is. At Alfresco, we've nailed many of the top-10 financial services companies as customers. Had we been a closed-source company and felt our product was nicely aligned with this vertical market, we undoubtedly would have set up an expensive sales force in New York City and started furiously seeding and fertilizing the market.

This would have been foolish, because our initial growth in many (in fact, unless I'm misremember, all of them) of these companies came from outside Manhattan. The beachheads were scattered throughout the US and Europe, for the most part. Now, we might have eventually found our way to these opportunities through NYC, but the process would have been costly and long.

With open source, we put the code on Sourceforge and the seeds (opportunities) come to us, download it, and do the planting themselves. We then proactively work on extending our footprint within a company through our initial champions within the customer.

This is efficient. This is what open source is all about.

Why you should be in Utah

I talked with an executive at another open source company last week, and he mentioned that he is considering building up some functions in Utah. Good idea, I told him. Utah is where Alfresco's inside sales team is, and where I'd like to see us build out support. It's cheaper here, and there are lots of great people.

There's also snow (skiing), mountains (biking), etc.

Here's a picture on the trail to Dog Lake on Saturday.



You know, deep down, you'd rather be riding this trail than sitting on 101, looking at those inane billboards....