Open for Business

Eclipse JSF Tools Turns 1.0

2007-07-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

I would like to congratulate Raghu Srinivasan from Oracle (Eclipse JSF Tools Project Lead) and his team for helping the community produce its first official release of the JSF Tools Project. A couple of weeks ago the Eclipse Foundation announced the Europa release which among other things included Web Tools Platform (WTP) 2.0 of which the JSF Tools Project v1.0 is an important piece.

JSF Tools v1.0 is a key milestone as it simplifies the development of JavaServer Faces applications in the Eclipse environment. The highlights of this release include performance improvements, a new Web Page Editor as well as a graphical editor for building HTML/JSP/JSF web pages. This release is also extensible by design, it comes with an extensibility framework that allows third party developers to come up with their own enhancements.

This release is yet another milestone in delivering "productivity with choice" to our customers. For more information on other recent activities around Oracle's involvement with Eclipse check out this blog entry.

- Download Eclipse Europa: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R2.0
- Release notes for Eclipse WTP 2.0:
http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/releases/2.0

Another Trinidad Milestone

2007-07-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

Last week the Apache MyFaces Trinidad team announced another milestone, the release of Trinidad v 1.2.1. This release comes with a JavaServer Faces 1.2 component library initially based on parts of Oracle's ADF Faces. Featured tags in this release include : breadcrumbs, navigation panels, panes, and tabbed panels. More tags can be found on this page. JSF 1.1 is still supported via Trinidad v 1.0.1.

Trinidad 1.2.1 binary and source distributions can be found in the central Maven repository under group id "org.apache.myfaces.trinidad". Downloads are available here.

If you need more frequent information on Trinidad, visit Matthias' blog.

Montreal, Je Me Souviens...

2007-06-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

After a short but efficient visit to Austin last week where I had the pleasure to speak at the Austin Oracle User Group and meet wonderful and equally interesting people, I am on the road again, precisely in Montreal. One of the people I wanted to meet F2F is whurley who attended my talk in Austin and posted a great summary on his blog. BTW, nice hanging out with you whurley!

The only thing that could be misleading in whurley's summary is when he says: "Their customers already use Eclipse for Java/Java EE development..." This is not true, our Java EE and SOA customers continue to enjoy JDeveloper as a superior development environment for their enterprise Java development. That said, we do have a well defined Eclipse strategy which is centered around "Productivity with choice" whereby we want to provide some of our customers who for whatever reason choose to develop using Eclipse the same level of productivity as they could have gotten using JDeveloper. That is one reason why we are stepping up our involvement in the Eclipse community.

Today I am in Montreal to speak at the ORA*GEC conference and meet key customers and partners in the region to share our view on open source and share some very cool features in our increasingly rich SOA stack. Although French is my native language I just realized it's more challenging than I thought to present tech stuff in French. To all my friends in Quebec, I promise to do my best!

Apache Trinidad Graduates!

2007-04-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

About a week ago and after 12 months hanging out in the Apache incubator, project Apache Trinidad received all the votes necessary from the Incubator PMC to graduate. Trinidad got 12 binding +1 votes by the Apache Incubator PMC, and two more non-binding by the Incubator community. It's been an exciting time in which we've seen more and more people from Oracle and of course outside Oracle join the community as users and even as committers. The traffic on the Trinidad mailing lists is really encouraging and the community is growing rapidly. In addition to Oracle which relies heavily on Trinidad for its own development, several companies are using including consulting shops who find the Trinidad components very useful and mature enough to build highly interactive web applications for their clients.

Trinidad is now going to be an important part of Apache MyFaces. You know where to go, we're working on the logistics to migrate the project from the incubation infrastructure to the MyFaces side of the house. Try it and let us know what you think.

Congrats to the Eclipse BPEL Designer Team!

2007-04-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

I simply want to congratulate Michal and the BPEL Designer crew for winning the 4th prize at the popular JAX conference in Germany. Check out the news here if you can read German. Keep up the great work!

I also want to point out for those of you who don't know yet, there are other Oracle-led Eclipse plug-ins which we are really proud of:
- JSF Tools Project
- Project Dali JPA Tools

Finally we have announced last month project EclipseLink which will provide developers with world-class O/R mapping capabilities (via the TopLink product line donation).

Go ahead and try those Eclipse projects out and let me know what you think. We also welcome your participation ;)

Quick Thoughts on Flex and Open Source

2007-04-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

Adobe plans to open source Flex, its development framework for building Flash-based web applications this should take effect when they go beta in June with the next Flex version code named Moxie (will be called Flex 3). Adobe is planning to use the Mozilla Public License or MPL. They are still planning to sell their Eclipse-based Flex Builder.

I read on CNet that "the move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code." Also read on the same article that Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit said "For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor, this will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our openness and commitment to community."

I am sorry Jeff but this says ABSOLUTELY nothing about Adobe's openness. Flex is as proprietary and as far from open as it gets. Adobe still locks me in when I use Flex whether the source is open or not it doesn't really matter. Only one vendor defined Flex and only one vendor provides runtime for it. In my opinion, open source is not enough. We at Oracle continue to step up our open source contributions but we believe in a much more important source of openness and that is open standards to which we religiously adhere. That's what really gives you the freedom you are looking for as a user. The freedom to switch vendors down the road should you need to. So when we open sourced our reusable user interface components (Apache Trinidad), in addition to opening the source to which the community responded very positively, it was a 100% standards-based contribution (in this case the standard in JavaServer Faces).

I am not trying to take anything away from the success Flex/Flash enjoys it definitely helps build much more interactive web pages and seems to be very popular. I personally block Flash animations on my browser (Firefox) but advertisers like to use flash to make your pages look like fireworks which really annoys me. The way Oracle believes pages should be built is using JavaServer Faces (JSF) components (typically embedded in JSP pages) and if you need richer UI you do that by injecting some Ajax into it. We believe Ajax and JSF go very well together and hold such great promise that we have decided to donate our Rich Client Framework (RCF) to the OSS community. Stay tuned for a bunch of OSS-related announcements in a couple of weeks at JavaOne. Using JDeveloper (100% free), Apache Trinidad or ADF, one can build highly interactive standards-based user interfaces without knowing anything about JSF, JavaScript, XML DOM, CSS, DHTML, etc. Developers are shielded from the complexity of Ajax development… I would like to disclaim that we do support Flash as one of the rendering options for JSF components like charts. You build your JSF-based page and later you could potentially make the decision to render the chart in Flash. Because the JSF component definition is separate from the rendering you can still do that in an elegant way and we support that in ADF Faces as part of the Rich Client Framework.

To make the long story short my point in this entry is the following: Flash is not a bad thing, some people seem to like it and use it quite heavily. But open sourcing it or parts of it (especially the tooling) doesn’t make it open enough for me and the kind of people I talk to in the developer community. They understand very well that openness comes from standards not necessarily from opening the kimono and showing the code even under a friendly license like MPL.

Dial 1-800-GOOG-411

2007-04-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

This might not be open source but it is FREE. If you are tired of being charged $1.5 by your cellular carrier for every 411 call, try Google's Voice Local Search. It is still experimental but we know what Google means by experimental or beta. It's usually pretty darn good. Although it was released earlier this month I just had a chance to try it today and I it worked just fine. About 75% of my attempts worked, when I'm not lucky I just say "back" and I get another chance. This service doesn't include residential requests but you can use it to find businesses. You can try "San Francisco California" and "Mas Sake Sushi" and it'll connect you or just say "text message" and it'll send you an sms (both free of charge).

This is a $7B/year market, more than 2.5 billion 411 calls are made every year in America. AT&T is toying with the free 411 calls but competition for this service comes from Jingle Networks which seems to have captured more than 5% of the 411 U.S. market in 2006. Another serious player is TellMe which was recently acquired by guess who... Microsoft of course.

IBM wants to finish JBoss

2007-03-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

After losing its founder and leader to music and other personal interests shortly after being acquired by Red Hat, JBoss has a new set of issues to deal with. Marc Fleury left after sharing with his colleagues how he felt about working with Red Hat: "I am increasingly experiencing diminishing returns on my emotional and professional investments at Red Hat."

The new danger comes from outside. IBM and Covalent announced today that they had each contributed a significant amount of IP to Apache's Geronimo to help users migrate from JBoss to Geronimo. Although I personally consider this a serious attack on JBoss, Shaun Connolly (VP of product management in the JBoss division of Red Hat) begs to differ calling the IBM-Covalent initiative "uninteresting". I still think that JBoss today is far more superior than Geronimo if they play a feature war. But we all know the better products don't always win. I also believe that existing JBoss customers may not want to switch to a less performant application server if they are already in production. If it works why fix it? But I still think that when giants like IBM or Microsoft go after a much smaller company, we know how that movie ends.

Speaking of movies let's rewind the JBoss/IBM movie. Let me refresh your memory on a few events that put together are confusing to say the least:

- In September of 2003, JBoss and IBM team up to cool off the growing popularity of Microsoft's C#
- Not too long after this Marc Fleury started bashing BEA and IBM on his blog
- In May of 2005 IBM purchases Gluecode a company that employed most Apache Geronimo contributors and positions this acquisition as their entry level, lightweight application server. They later called the Geronimo-based product WAS Community Edition.
- Exactly two years after deciding IBM was nice and C#/Microsoft evil, Marc Fleury partners with Microsoft (Sept 2005). Their partnership shocked me (and I was not the only one) but I thought it was pretty clever after all. Marc described that day as his best day ever.
The idea there was that half JBoss servers were running on Windows so let's work together on making JBoss work even better on Windows and SQL Server, Active Directory and single sign-on, etc.
- Then Red Hat buys JBoss, Microsoft becomes great friends with Novell and Fleury doesn't like working for Red Hat, fakes a paternity leave and never comes back to work. [Sorry I had to compress the story]
- Next IBM feels JBoss is kind of vulnerable and decides to partner with Covalent to hurt them even more, hence the announcement.

Concretely IBM (which roughly employs half of Geronimo's committers) and Covalent (which already provides support for Apache's Tomcat, HTTP Server and Axis) are getting together to provide quality support for Geronimo and lure people away from JBoss. Paul Buck, director of IBM WebSphere open source said that they were going to provide a migration tool that would go through the J2EE application itself and look for any required changes at the source that we know are different between JBoss and Geronimo.

I am interested in your thoughts, do you think IBM with this move is going hurt JBoss' business in a significant way? Can somebody tell me why we never see Glassfish in these battles? It's also a Java EE open source application server but no one seems to take it seriously. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who reads this blog who uses Glassfish in the enterprise.

Oracle on The Linux Foundation Board

2007-03-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

It's no news that Oracle has been a serious player in the Linux community. Our commitment to the Linux community started way back in 1998 when we released the industry's first commercial database on Linux. We also like Linux because we run our own IT systems on Linux and realize first-hand the benefit of lower IT costs from using Linux in a grid computing infrastructure. Additionally, Oracle's Linux kernel team contributed a cluster file system OCFS to the Linux kernel under the GPL license. OCFS2 was the first ever cluster file system in the mainline Linux kernel. Finally we recently announced Oracle Unbreakable Linux 2.0 which is a support program that provides enterprises with world-class global support for Linux.

All this to say that Oracle/Wim's nomination on the Linux Foundation board is no accident. Who better than Wim Coekaerts to represent Oracle on that diverse board?

Congrats Wim!

Apache Trinidad version 1.0.0-incubating

2007-03-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

A little more than a year ago Oracle donated a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification to the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF and the community chose the name it Apache Trinidad. Today we’re excited to announce that we reached another milestone: the release of Apache Trinidad Core version 1.0.0-incubating.

Both binary and source code are available at the Apache Incubator Trinidad Podling page.

Live demos and release notes are also available.

Enjoy!

What is EclipseLink?

2007-03-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

Hopefully by now most of you know that Oracle has been actively contributing resources and IP to the Eclipse community. Oracle has been an active member of the Eclipse community since its inception and a leading participant in both the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and the Technology project. Oracle currently leads the JavaServer Faces tooling, Dali JPA tools and BPEL tools projects. Before diving into to the announcement, I would like to personally thank all the developers they know who they are who spontaneously stopped by the Oracle booth at EclipseCon'07 to tell me how much they thought Oracle is doing a better job of working with the OSS community and how much their perception of Oracle had changed.

So what’s new?

- First, Oracle is now a board member of the Eclipse Foundation.
- Second, Oracle steps up its involvement from simple membership to “Strategic Developer” status. Based on the size of our latest donation (see below) and the level of involvement required for this project and Oracle’s interest in the success of the Eclipse platform we decided to upgrade our status.
- Third, Oracle is donating its award winning Java persistence framework, Oracle TopLink, to the open source community. What’s the big deal TopLink was already donated to the JCP and project Glassfish as well as Spring 2.0? That was TopLink Essentials (TLE) not TopLink. I will post another blog entry soon explaining the difference between TLE and TopLink. Basically Oracle TopLink which has been around for 13 years is hands down the industry's most advanced persistence product with object-to-relational, object-to-XML, and Enterprise Information System data access through all of the major standards, including the Java Persistence API, Java API for XML Binding, Service Data Objects, and the Java Connector Architecture. TopLink supports most databases and most application servers and most development tools.
- Last but not least, based on this major contribution (TopLink source code and test cases), Oracle proposed an Eclipse project to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform. The project’s name is Eclipse Persistence Platform (EclipseLink). EclipseLink will be led by Oracle.

Can you provide more details about EclipseLink? (from the EclipseLink FAQ)

EclipseLink will deliver a number of components (listed below) which together will constitute a solid framework with support for a number of persistence standards. Here is a list of some planned components:
- EclipseLink-ORM will provide an extensible Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework with support for the Java Persistence API (JPA). It will provide persistence access through JPA as well as having extended persistence capabilities configured through custom annotations and XML. These extended persistence features include powerful caching (including clustered support), usage of advanced database specific capabilities, and many performance tuning and management options.
- EclipseLink-OXM will provide an extensible Object-XML Mapping (OXM) framework with support for the Java API for XML Binding (JAXB). It will provide serialization services through JAXB along with extended functionality to support meet in the middle mapping, advanced mappings, and critical performance optimizations.
- EclipseLink -SDO will provide a Service Data Object (SDO) implementation as well as the ability to represent any Java object as an SDO and leverage all of its XML binding and change tracking capabilities.
- EclipseLink -DAS will provide an SDO Data Access Service (DAS) that brings together SDO and JPA.
- EclipseLink -DBWS will provide a web services capability for developers to easily and efficiently expose their underlying relational database (stored procedures, packages, tables, and ad-hoc SQL) as web services. The metadata driven configuration will provide flexibility as well as allow default XML binding for simplicity.
- EclipseLink -XR will deliver key infrastructure for situations where XML is required from a relational database. The metadata driven mapping capabilities EclipseLink-ORM and EclipseLink-OXM are both leveraged for the greatest flexibility. Using this approach to XML-Relational access enables greater transformation optimizations as well as the ability to leverage the Eclipse Persistence Platform’s shared caching functionality.
- EclipseLink -EIS provides support for mapping Java POJOs onto non-relational data stores using the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) API.

Oracle's love story with Eclipse seems to be getting stronger, is JDeveloper dead?
I keep getting this question over and over. So before anybody posts it in the comments I will address it. At Oracle we believe in "Productivity with Choice". Oracle remains fully committed to JDeveloper as the IDE of choice for Java and service-oriented architecture development. That said, we are also committed to helping our customers who for whatever reason choose Eclipse for their development. So the answer is crystal clear, JDeveloper is stronger than ever and Oracle will continue to invest in making it better.

These Eclipse-related announcements are yet another proof that Oracle continues to deploy significant efforts to initiate, lead, and contribute technology and resources to the OSS community. Stay tuned for more on Oracle and OSS!

Productivity with choice

2007-02-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

This article published in the Oracle Magazine March/April 2007 issue explains well our tooling strategy and why Oracle is committed to both JDeveloper and Eclipse to increase our customers' productivity no matter what development platform they end up using. Thanks to Rich Schwerin for putting it together:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/07-mar/o27opensource.html

Oracle supports UC Berkeley lab to work on OSS systems

2006-06-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

Oracle along with IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., NNT Multimedia Communications Laboratories Inc., and Nortel Networks, are pledging annual contributions of up to $170,000 for the next five years. This financial help will help the RAD lab to innovate and make its creations freely available under the open source Berkeley software distribution license. In addition, these companies are going to make some resources availble to act as consultants. In 2005 the RAD lab was launched with a $7.5M donation from Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

The projects will be focused for the most part on Artificial Intelligence based systems to help maintain large distributed computing systems used by data-intensive Internet businesses.

More on this in the press release.

Oracle's Ajax-enabled contribution coming up

2006-06-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

On May 17th during Oracle’s general session at JavaOne 2006, Thomas Kurian announced that Oracle is about to open source yet another exciting technology. Indeed, a year ago Thomas announced at JavaOne that we were going to open source our ADF Faces components which are server-side user interface components based on the JavaServer Faces standard. Thomas also announced that same year that we were going to make Eclipse better by leading a couple of initiative. Well, Oracle delivered. Today we have open sourced ADF Faces and we are leading three different Eclipse plug-ins which are Dali (O/R mapping design time for EJB30 and JPA), JSF tooling and co-leading the BPEL design time with IBM. As for the ADF Faces components (excluding the rich client or Ajax-enabled components) they have been donated to the Apache software foundation. The project is currently waiting to graduate out of incubation and more information can be found here:
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/adffaces.html

So what’s exciting about these Ajax-enabled JSF components anyway?

Oracle has enhanced its already extensive JSF component library ADF Faces, with a set of rich and interactive components that will be part of the ADF Faces Rich Client donation to the open source community. All these components leverage extensively the technique referred to as Ajax. Ajax is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by asynchronously exchanging data with the server, so that the page does not have to be entirely reloaded each time the user triggers an event. Ajax applications are typically more responsive and provide richer interactivity.

Oracle has already donated 100+ server-side (or thin-client) components to the Apache community. Additionally, Oracle will be donating a new set of rich Ajax-enabled components, which will bring the total number of donated components to 150+ JSF components.

The list below is a subset of the JSF rich component library that Oracle decided to contribute to the OSS community:

1- Table
The new table comes with the same functionality already provided by the current ADF Faces table component, plus some extra features that will dramatically enhance the end-user experience. The new table component comes with full support for asynchronously fetching data from the underlying services using the XMLHttpRequest object. The table provides scrolling through records, sorting, and single and multi-select out of the box, as well as built-in support for swapping columns at runtime.

2- Pop-up Menu
One of the coolest and most requested features in a rich and interactive end-user environment is the ability to right-click and display a popup menu at runtime. The new rich-client version of ADF Faces provides a popup component that can be attached to components such as a table. This will allow application developers to provide end-user actions via a popup menu that otherwise would have to be hard-coded in JavaScript. Now the developer experience is purely JSF/Java while the end-user gets the desired "thick-client" behavior in the browser.

3- Accordion
This is a common component in most desktop applications and helps the application developer optimize the use of real estate on the client side. The end-user can click on an accordion and display its content. The new ADF Faces component library comes with two different accordions: one that only displays one accordion at the time and one that can display multiple accordions at a time. So, now application developers will have the same type of functionality in the browser as they have in their desktop applications.

4- Tree
For most application developers the hardest Web widget to implement is a rich Tree widget. ADF Faces comes with a Tree widget that has built-in support for asynchronously communicating with the underlying services. When interacted with, the Tree component will not re-render the entire page, which enhances the end-user experience.

5- Menu
ADF Faces also comes with a "regular" menu component. This component can be used by application developers to create toolbars similar to what is used in desktop applications. The menu is leveraging Ajax and provides DHTML dropdown menus etc. From the application developer’s view there is no JavaScript needed to enable this JSF component - only JSF and Java.

With this new rich client component library application developers will be able to leverage Ajax to its fullest without writing a single line of JavaScript to get the rich desktop user experience on the browser. We are not sure yet if this donation is going to end up in Apache it is not up to us it is completely up to the Apache MyFaces community. Stay tuned!

What is SASH anyway?

2006-02-09T17:03:00.001-08:00

One of the challenges most people I talk to have in dealing with OSS is integrating projects that were designed to work together. Many people are trying to use Struts with Hibernate and/or Spring with Hibernate and end up having integration problems…The reality is that enterprises run open source and commercial software side-by-side and will continue to do so. That’s why Oracle partnered with SourceLabs to solve this issue for Oracle AS 10g customers. SASH simply means (Struts, Apache Axis, Hibernate and Spring). SourceLabs provides services around their tested SASH stack. Oracle customers using server-side Java are now able to improve productivity, reduce operational risk, and adopt open platforms with confidence.

I find this exciting and it’s inline with Fusion Middleware’s Hot-Pluggable message (believe me it’s not just a marketing buzzword) which essentially means that we are willing to compete on industry standards and if you find a module that works better than one of the components in the Oracle stack, you can seamlessly swap it out with the equivalent module of your choice. Oracle’s middleware is engineered to work well with third-party products, including open source and IBM's WebSphere line.

To get more information and even download SASH for Oracle AS 10g, go to the SASH section on OTN.

What is SASH anyway?

2006-02-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Is this where OSS is going?

2006-02-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

When I saw this deal today I thought it summarized pretty well where open source seems to be going. The news in itself is not very exciting but it’s yet another open source startup raising a pretty good round from top tier VCs. In a nutshell, Alfresco which offers a document management platform raised an $8M series B investment round from Mayfield and Accel (which had already led round A). This confirms that:

- Open source is more professional. Open source developers are not what they used to be (midnight hackers working from their garage). More often than not, open source developers today are professional developers employed by large vendors (like Oracle or IBM) or well-funded startups like Alfresco or Spikesource (backed by Kleiner Perkins). Additionally large vendors offer professional support for open source projects (for example Oracle, IBM, Novell and HP support Linux).

- Open source is (slowly but surely) moving up the stack. First, the debate is not limited to Linux vs. Windows anymore. Also, the target open source end user profile is changing as open source moves up the stack. With Linux and Eclipse, typical users are system administrators and developers. Open source is moving beyond infrastructure software and tools into different areas with various degrees of success. Alfresco seems to be doing a good job in document management and Asterisk seems to offer a very popular PBX/VoIP telephony system (I am a happy Asterisk user without knowing much about PBX systems).

Is open source ready for ERP or CRM? Those of us who have been around a while in this industry know full well that VCs are not always right but in the last 18 months they have been very active investors in open source based startups with services-based business models. Time will tell if they were on the money! Let's not get too excited for now I don’t see traditional commercial software going anywhere anytime soon.

Orbeon delivers an amazing mix of AJAX and XForms

2006-01-20T14:10:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to congratulate the Orbeon crew for putting out the 3rd major release of the LGPL-licensed Orbeon PresentationServer. OPS 3.0 features an AJAX-based XForms engine. The new engine brings responsive XForms user interfaces to mainstream web browsers without the need for plug-ins.

It’s all open source and available from ObjectWeb at:
http://forge.objectweb.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=168

Examples and documentation for OPS are available online:
http://www.orbeon.com/ops/doc/

Talking about ObjectWeb, Erik Bruchez (Orbeon’s Chief Architect) will give a talk about XForms at ObjectWebCon '06 in Paris on January 31. The talk will mainly consist of a live XForms tutorial built on top of OPS 3.0, with the goal of showing the audience that using the right platform, XForms is really cool and productive and can be used on mainstream browsers without plug-ins (if you use platforms like OPS 3.0).

I will also present at the same conference, come say hi if you’re around (see you there Erik):

Oracle and NetBeans

2006-01-19T19:00:00.000-08:00

Following the Sun-Oracle town hall meeting last week at Oracle headquarters where Larry and Scott made a few exciting announcements, I started getting questions about Oracle's position vis-a-vis NetBeans. The reason is that Scott (and later Jonathan Schwartz on his blog) mentioned some kind Oracle "adoption and endorsement" of NetBeans.

Oracle's IDE strategy is very clear, Thomas Kurian's interview on OTN earlier this week doesn't leave much room for interpretation and at the moment Oracle's tools strategy is limited to JDeveloper and Eclipse. Here is the statement from Thomas, Oracle's Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware:

"At Oracle, we have our own development tool, Oracle JDeveloper, which is available for free download. Our new version, JDeveloper 10g Release 3, has an extensive list of new features and is the single biggest release we have ever done of the product…

...Because we are committed to providing developers with choice, we are also taking a leadership role within the Eclipse community. We are currently leading three different groups within the Eclipse Foundation for Java and BPEL technologies, and we are actively involved in integrating our Fusion Middleware products with Eclipse. Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse. We certainly think Sun's NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and we're watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true."

Is open source software more vulnerable?

2006-01-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

Do you think that more eye balls looking at open source projects make all bugs shallow or quite the contrary that some of these eye balls looking at the code could be malicious and take advantage of the exposed code to attack your open source based systems?

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, stated: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." by Eric S. Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Apparently The U.S. government's Department of Homeland Security thinks otherwise. It is investing in an ambitious 3 year project aiming at improving reliability and security of widely deployed open source projects. In late 2004 the San Francisco based auditing software company Coverity found that the Linux kernel had far fewer security vulnerabilities than a typical commercial software package. According to this article, this same company was selected for this project along with engineers from Stanford and anti-virus vendor Symantec to pinpoint and fix dangerous vulnerabilities (such as buffer overflows and memory allocation bugs) in widely used open source projects such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla and Sendmail.

Can't wait to see the results of this project will confirm Linus' law or not. In my opinion, there is no general rule in this case. Open source is not safer nor is it more vulnerable than commercial software. It really depends on what we are comparing. An open source project is going to be more or less reliable based on its popularity (nobody was interested in attacking Firefox until it became successful) the governance behind it, the size of the community (the more the better)...

Another Oracle Donation to Open Source

2005-12-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

This is exciting news web developers who believe in J2EE, so buckle up!

I am pleased to announce that Oracle is contributing a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification to the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF. What it will be called in the future is yet to be determined by the Apache MyFaces community.

What's in it for Oracle?
We like to get behind technologies we believe in. We think JSF holds great promise and Apache MyFaces is a great JSR-127 implementation. By supporting JSF and MyFaces we are hoping that more vendors are going to join us and strengthen the Faces community.

Why should I care?
I would say wait till you try it. This is going to give a big boost to the JavaServer Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code comes with great functionality out of the box. How would you like to have high quality capabilities such as: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, internationalization and accessibility? This donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been thoroughly tested and come with high quality documentation.

How about tools?
Oracle developers are also leading the Eclipse JSF tooling project, we are going to make sure that this plug-in works well with MyFaces and its components to help J2EE developers develop and deploy great looking web applications using open source technology donated by Oracle.

After several months of effort, I'm very excited to see this donation go forward. We know that our donation is being placed in very good hands, and we look forward to seeing more components "blossom" as part of the Apache MyFaces project.

I'm Back!

2005-12-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

I would like to apologize to my readers for being so quiet for the last couple of months. I've been too busy and on the road quite a bit. I had a chance to speak at the Gartner Open Source Summit in Florida as well as ApacheCon in San Diego. I hope you like the news in my next blog entry!

EuroOSCON 2005

2005-10-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

I just landed a couple of hours ago in Amsterdam after a rather smooth flight from SFO through Chicago O'Hare. I came here to attend EuroOSCON 2005. I am looking forward to this conference where I will also be speaking on Wednesday and reconnecting with all my OSS buddies. I am sure a lot of people are wondering what Oracle is doing for open source, my presenation will touch on this of course but I will also be at the Oracle booth answering questions. Feel free to stop by if you're around.

What did Oracle and Zend Announce this Week?

2005-10-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Oracle and Zend announced general availability of Zend Core for Oracle. This is exciting news, yet another sign that Oracle understands OSS and how commercial software can complement open source. Oracle is doing all it can to help developers out there with the performance, reliability and robustness they need. Let me try to shed some light on this announcement by answering some of the questions I have been getting.

Who's Zend anyway?
Zend is really the PHP company. They have Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski on their payroll, they are Zend's founders and also the original developers who helped PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf rewrite a new PHP parsing engine in 1997. Andi and Zeev created the very popular open source Zend Engine. Zend's products are used by 8,000 companies worldwide including Lufthansa, Avaya, Sprint, HP and Boeing.

What's Zend Core for Oracle?
Zend Core for Oracle provides out-of-the-box IT organizations with a stable, high performance, easy-to-install and supported PHP development and production environment fully integrated with the Oracle Database. Without Zend Core for Oracle customers had to download all the pieces individually (Apache server, PHP, Oracle DB…) and cobble it all together. This was a very tedious, unpredictable experience that serious enterprises did not want to go through. Zend Core for Oracle is a one stop shop where you get one install file and you know it's going to work and if god forbid, it doesn't you get support from Zend (for PHP-related issues) and Oracle (for database-related issues). Safe feeling, isn't it?

Why should I care? LAMP is FREE!
This is the most frequent question and the answer is very simple. If free was the only criterion, then why is Geronimo not everywhere and why is Oracle still showing strong DB and application server sales, etc.? The truth is, people care deeply about more important things. We worked with Zend to do this because their customers as well as ours wanted us to deliver a solution like Zend Core for Oracle. There are 18 million websites out there written in PHP, scripting languages are too popular today for Oracle to ignore them. Zend is the leader in PHP deployments. It's also important to note that 25-30% of their customers run on Oracle (not all of them are LAMP worshipers). Oracle and Zend noticed that many already had their data in Oracle databases when they started using PHP to write web application. They enjoyed the quick turnaround and easy to deploy experience they got out of PHP. Others come from the LAMP stack and want more stability, performance, security and reliability and moved to Oracle DB. Also organizations with a significant investment in Linux and Oracle now have the option to deploy PHP apps on top of these databases and worry less about the issue of drivers then they may have seen in past. Zend Core for Oracle delivers an updated PHP OCI8 driver, which both companies have worked hard to make more reliable and stable for Oracle Database-driven Web applications.

Have you heard of OPAL? Well it's an acronym just like LAMP but it stands for [Oracle, PHP, Apache and Linux]. Believe me, it is more popular than you think. Zend Core for Oracle is an OPAL system - technically an OPA, it also runs on IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and Windows (currently still in beta).

Bottom line: The real challenge for open source software is to provide the ease of use and a clear chain of accountability that IT organizations require for mission-critical systems. Zend Core is a good answer to that.

What happened to Oracle's commitment to Java/J2EE?
Today, you cannot think ONE language. This is the SOA age. Web services don't care what flavor the portal or the back-end business or persistence logic is written in? We don't need to pick a winner, we support open standards and interoperability. Also, we make sure we keep our finger on the pulse. Scripting languages particularly PHP are very popular, our customers use them, therefore we need to provide them with a pleasant/seamless experience to their job. We are more committed to Java/J2EE than ever, our app server is the fastest growing J2EE container in the market, our tools support the latest Java and J2EE specifications as soon as they are out (and most of the times before – EJB3.0 basis or RI in Glassfish for example).
PHP is actually interoperating quite nicely with Java on various levels. First we have been supporting PHP for 2 years in the Oracle application server. One can write a PHP page and deploy the HTML file on the Oracle container and it will be parsed and rendered seamlessly. Second, PHP5 (unlike PHP4) has great support for SOAP, this means Java can call PHP-based web services and vice versa. Also using BPEL PM, users can orchestrate Web services such that PHP-based partner links can call Java-based services. Finally there is a JSR we are planning to support as soon as it’s ready. It's JSR-223, Oracle and Zend are part of the expert group. It essentially allows Java to call scripting languages and vise versa. With all this in place in the Oracle stack, people could rapidly write PHP pages (if they choose not to use JSF or they already have existing PHP code) and easily talk to back-end business logic written in Java that makes DB calls.

OK, I'm interested where do I start?
I recommend the PHP technology Center on OTN (Oracle Technology Network). In there you'll find a bunch of links to useful resources including upcoming events, installation guides, articles, blogs, best practices and last but not least a link to download Zend Core for Oracle. Zend also has a page on their website specifically for people who are interested in Zend Core for Oracle: www.zend.com/core/oracle. Finally I will be speaking at OSCON next week on this topic. So if you're planning to be there, feel free to drop by the Oracle booth and ask all the questions you want. If you are in the bay area I highly recommend attending the Zend/PHP Conference. Definitely check out Oracle's Ken Jacobs (aka Dr DBA) who will talk about Zend Core for Oracle and the relationship between Zend and Oracle.

Microsoft Befriends Foe and Takes Aim at iTunes

2005-10-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (10/11/05) Apple announced record numbers and amazing profits. A third of Apple's revenue comes from iPod sales. So Apple takes the music/media business very seriously. Today Steve Jobs unveiled a new video iPod along with a new complementary version of iTunes that allows people to buy music videos. To top all this Walt Disney and Apple Computer have reached an agreement under which ABC and Disney Channel television shows will be available for download from iTunes for $1.99 per episode. Apple is clearly on a media roll.

All this is beautiful, Right?

Not really. Microsoft astutely chose this moment to settle its problems with RealNetworks in a two-part deal under which Microsoft pays $460M in cash to RealNetworks to settle the antitrust claims and $301M in cash to support RealNetworks' music and games efforts. Microsoft will recoup money by earning credits (amounts were not disclosed) for each Rhapsody subscriber referred through MSN. RealNetworks will support MSN Search and Microsoft will be a huge channel for RealNetworks music and also assist in the performance of RealPlayer on Windows. Here is another big win for RealNetworks: users of MSN Messenger will be able to play music from the Rhapsody catalog of 1 million songs while chatting. More details on this deal can be found here.

Bottom line:
Apple has iTunes the leading online music store, as well as iPod the leading digital music player. I hate to say it but the benefit of the M$FT/RealNetworks alliance is interoperability and openness. The truth is that Apple's strategy is based on customer lock-in (in fact I am one of those locked-in customers). Apple does all it can to make sure people who buy music via iTunes play it on the iPod. Can they continue to do this and maintain market leadership? Microsoft and RealNetworks beg to differ. Let’s see how all this media business unfolds and what role will Yahoo and AOL play in this battle. So stay iTuned... or not.

Geronimo is Certified

2005-10-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

IBM's acquisition of Gluecode (read main contributors behind the Apache Geronimo project) is clearly giving a shot in the arm to Apache's J2EE application server. Apache Geronimo is now officially J2EE 1.4 certified. It would be interesting to see how this application server will hurt JBoss' growth. Although Geronimo is not nearly as mature or as popular as JBoss today, there are two things that could change that:

- First, IBM wants JBoss dead and they are putting the necessary resources behind Geronimo to improve it and close the gap with JBoss and I have to say they are showing frequent and rather fast progress.

- Second Geronimo is licensed under the Apache license which has less strings attached than LGPL (JBoss' license). LGPL, though not as "viral" as GPL, gets IT managers pretty nervous about its arguably blurry/open_for_interpretation implications. Some think LGPL still places too many requirements on organizations who modify and redistribute the code (check this thread out).

Bottom line: Geronimo joined JBoss and JOnAS (both LGPL) as fellow open source J2EE 1.4 certified servers. IMO, while J2EE certification helps ensure compatibility and interoperability, it doesn't necessarily make an app server enterprise ready. Here is the official list of certified app servers. Please share your thoughts as to how you think this OSS app server battle will play out.

Is this really it for Firefox?

2005-10-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

I hope not!

It would be very sad if the only window on the WWW was IE courtesy of M$FT; wouldn't it? I read this InternetWeek article yesterday that provides some fresh statistics. It shows that Firefox is not growing; it is in fact loosing ground to competition dropping from 8.27% the month before to 7.55%. Internet Explorer is pretty much steady at a solid 86%. I couldn't believe the numbers were still this high for IE when everyone I know including my parents use Firefox. The truth is I live in Silicon Valley and all my friends are computer savvy. I guess it is not a representative sample of the world's internet surfers. Late last month, Opera announced its decision to strip out ads from its free browser, but it's a bit too late. It seems that there is a group of people who wanted something else than IE, they all jumped on Firefox by now. The result is that Opera couldn’t grab more than 0.5% of the market.

Last week HP announced it was going to preinstall Netscape on all HP and Compaq machines starting early 2006. This is good news. For those who don't know yet, Netscape 8 is based on Firefox, but it lets users switch between both the Firefox and IE engines. Many Web sites have been built to work with IE, so supporting both the Firefox and IE engines gives Netscape users additional compatibility. Today Netscape's share of the market is still under a poor 2.5%. Let's see if HP's decision to distribute Netscape will drive this number up and by how much. It would be interesting to find out how many Netscape users stick with the Firefox engine and how many switch to the IE engine.

Also interesting to note that the battle between Microsoft and open source shows completely different results on the web server side. I looked at the latest statistics on Netcraft this month; Apache servers dominate the market with 70% market share and growing while Microsoft is stuck at 20%.

It's also sad to see hackers attack Firefox's marketing website (spreadfirefox.com) which is being rewritten from scratch as we speak to increase security. How stupid do you need to be to take that site down? I will buy a Firefox T-shirt as soon as I post this entry to support the Firefox crew! They are only $14 and they look cool.

Oracle buys Innobase

2005-10-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

This morning Oracle announced the acquisition of open source software company Innobase. As we expand our commitment to open source software beyond Linux, this is a good/strategic move for Oracle. Innobase has long been an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for MySQL. InnoDB was distributed under a GPL license as part of MySQL Pro.

Essentially InnoDB is a table type in MySQL which offers several key advantages such as:

InnoDB tables are transactional: they provide rollback and commit capabilities.
InnoDB is the only table type in MySQL which supports foreign key constraints.
InnoDB tables are fast, even faster than
InnoDB tables have row level locking: they allow higher concurrency
InnoDB tables provide an Oracle-style consistent read, also known as multiversioned concurrency control.
There is a hot backup tool available for InnoDB, which allows users to make backups of a running database
Multiversioning also allows you to dump tables from your database with SELECT INTO OUTFILE without setting locks on the tables
InnoDB tables have automatic crash recovery

Charles Rozwat, Oracle's Executive Vice President in charge of Database and Middleware Technology asserted that Oracle intends to continue developing the InnoDB technology and expand its commitment to open source software. It'll be interesting to see how this affects MySQL. Stay tuned!

Sun and Google vs. M$FT?

2005-10-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

I can't wait to hear what Google and Sun are going to announce at this news conference. Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz posted in his blog a bunch of hints. For example he said: "If I were a betting man, I'd bet the world was about to change." And he talked about what had just happened in Massachusetts. He also said that in his last keynote he asked the audience if they'd rather give up their browser or their desktop and they "Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink."

In this article, Tim Bray says that OpenDocument will turn everything inside out.

So if I were a betting man, I'd say that Sun and Google are going to try to hurt their common enemy (Microsoft) by innovating around accessing Office-like functionality from the browser using open standards. This would probably leverage Open Office suite/expertise and Google's expertise in delivering rich-client/sophisticated/AJAX apps on thin clients at an acceptable and sometimes amazing performance.

So don't miss the new conference!

[Update] It turns out the deal seems to cover more aspects than I had anticipated. Sun also plans to distribute the Google Toolbar with Java and Google will buy lots more Sun servers. For more on this story/partnership check out this page.

Fleury on his surprising pact with the...

2005-09-29T18:29:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to my entry on the JBoss / Microsoft partnership, you may want to check out this interview by Martin LaMonica. In it Martin asks some questions we would have liked to ask Marc, unfortunately Marc is not as outspoken as we know him, his answers are on the safe side… Here are some elements that caught my attention:

- Marc confirms that the world is not monolithic; he said that 50% of JBoss users deploy it on Windows. Frankly I thought it would be less than that and more in favor of Linux.

- One of the main intents in this deal (from a JBoss perspective) is to gain credibility

- Both companies are going to commit resources, as an example Fleury said that his portal team is looking into integrating JBoss with integrating Active Directory and single sign-on

- He considers BEA (less now) and IBM as his main competition today but he did mention Oracle (currently the fastest growing app server on the market), Sun, and RedHat.

- I disagree with Fleury on the fact that software licenses are not the profitable part of the business for software companies. Revenue from licensing typically scales much better than services. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle are good examples of profitable software companies. This said, even if margins on services (just like hardware) are less interesting than charging for downloads, many companies are doing great with the services part of their business and IBM is a good example (little less than $50B last year in services only).

Is Apple Going to Recall the Nanos and Reinstate the Minis?

2005-09-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

It always starts with a presentation by Steve Jobs. If you haven't seen him selling his products yet, I highly recommend this video. This guy can sell ice to Eskimos. He is one of the best CEOs/Evangelists alive. Of course it helps when what you are selling are some of the coolest and most amazingly designed products on the planet.

Not so long ago (9/7/05), Apple announced the iPod Nano. Jobs called it impossibly small and magic. And that’s true, I ran to the nearest Apple store and held one in my hands and sure enough it’s magic. I love gadgets and even though I already own two iPods, I almost bought this one (I am not the only one). Well, I am glad I didn't. Here is why.

- First of all the impossibly small device is also impossibly delicate/fragile. There are so many reports out there of people cracking their Nano screens or scratching them. Just Google it or go to Amazon.com and read the reviews. People are mad! Here is an example: "I have only carried it in my small pocket in my shorts and nothing is in there to scratch it. I still can't figure how the screen looks like it has been rubbed with sandpaper. My screen has scratched up so badly that all the images are starting to become distorted."

- What made the iPod Nano so famous is actually my main problem with it: SIZE (62% smaller than the now-discontinued iPod mini). For me it's way too small/thin. If I put it in my back pocket (and I can because it fits everywhere) and I sit on it, it's gone! Okay, the fact that I weigh 200 lbs doesn't help. If I don't sit on it I can forget it in my jeans and stick it in the washing machine. So its size makes it easier to brake but also easier to lose or misplace (I know that women reported having difficulties finding it in their purse). I truly believe the iPod Mini's size is the ideal size for me, I don’t recall complaining about its size or hearing anybody saying they needed an iPod smaller than the already compact Mini.

A couple of suggestions for Apple:

- Reinstate the iPod Mini and let people who can afford to buy the Nano every time they break it, lose it, or scratch it so bad they can’t even read the screen; have at it!

- Put all the great Nano enhancements in the truly sturdy and proven iPod Mini (Apple sold more Minis than any other iPods). Some of the features I like about the Nano are the color/bright display and the flash memory which, unlike the miniature hard drives used by the Mini, have no moving parts and this makes the device less fragile and more reliable. I am not so much into pictures on my MP3 player (or my phone for that matter) for the same reason I don't need a toaster imbedded in my DVD player, I use both but not at the same time. Who can enjoy pictures on a 1.5-inch screen anyway?

One last complaint and then I'm done; I promise. If you haven’t noticed it yet, one important reason Apple wants you to own an iPod is the sell iTunes. This is great, a bit like the Gillette model, cheap razors as long as you buy the blades. Or the HP model, cheap printers, expensive ink cartridges… Except that iPods are everything but cheap. I am a little disappointed with the fact the Apple makes it very difficult for us to move our MP3 music in and out of our iTunes/iPod. My analogy still holds, HP cartridges cannot be used in Cannon printers, etc. The reality is that encoding schemes such as AAC and Apple Lossless don't have the wide support that the MP3 format has. So Apple limits you in terms of what you can do with your music outside of iTunes and the iPod. Every iPod can play MP3 and AAC files, but Apple Lossless works only on iPods with a dock connector. If you use a non-Apple MP3 player, you're even more limited: they don’t support AAC or Apple Lossless. Likewise, many newer car/home stereo systems can play CDs containing MP3 files, making this a great way to store long music mixes for a road trip or a party. But if you burn a playlist as an MP3 CD, iTunes skips over AAC and Apple Lossless tracks.

I hope Apple takes some of these interoperability issues into account for their next products/releases otherwise I may switch to a competitor even if it will never offer me the same design quality and user experience I get with Apple products.

[Update] Check out this hilarious video posted on the NY Times.

Can You Believe This?!

2005-09-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought that Microsoft and JBoss (yes you read it right an OPEN SOURCE application server company) would ever be anywhere together but in a battlefield or a court of law? Well, they just announced earlier today a tight partnership whereby the two companies are going to collaborate in several areas. One of them is that JBoss' persistence layer (using Hibernate or EJB3.0) is going to support Microsoft SQL Server; another area of collaboration would be JBoss deployment/management using Microsoft Operations Manager or JBoss supporting Microsoft's Active Directory for single sign-on… This deal does not seem to involve money but the companies have committed to dedicate development resources.

Who's loving it?

- I can hear OSS purists say how in the world can Marc Fleury touch Microsoft a with a 10-foot poll after everything he said about them? It's called business! In my opinion Marc Fleury pulled off a sweet deal, it adds to JBoss' credibility as a company and a product. Believe me I used to run an infrastructure software startup and credibility is a huge deal!

- Microsoft hates endorsing Java or open source but they had to recognize that the world out there is all but monolithic and most CIOs say that both .Net and Java cohabit in their systems. In other words, Microsoft chose JBoss as its interoperability play/partner. Finally is always happy when it can punch IBM in the face, and this is clearly pointing the gun at IBM who's investing in Geronimo (via the Gluecode acquisition) to eliminate JBoss from the map. Anything that helps JBoss disserves IBM's middleware story. BTW, I don't buy IBM's message when they say that open-source application servers have a place in the market for smaller installations and departmental applications, to that end, we bought Gluecode whose product is based on Apache's Geronimo application server. In other words it's a migration play from Geronimo to WebSphere. I think it’s a play to destroy JBoss. Time will tell but I have a feeling today's announcement will do everything but weaken JBoss.

Who's feeling the pain?

- IBM for the reasons mentioned above. Anything that serves JBoss (small enemy) and Microsoft (the real enemy) doesn’t sit well with big blue.

- This announcement's timing is horrible for BEA. Today is the first day of BEA's main event BEAWorld. As if the once-sexy-middleware-company wasn’t hurting enough with OSS commoditizing their #1 source of revenue (WebLogic) much faster than BEA could come up with adjacent areas of growth.

- Microsoft is sending a message to Sun. We know you have Glassfish (also an open source application server) and we told the world that we are the greatest friends now and that we were going to cooperate a lot more moving forward. Ooops Sorry, your app server isn't good enough. We'll have to find new friends: JBoss.

This seemingly happy marriage needs to be taken with a grain of salt for the following reasons:

- I want to see what these two companies will actually develop and if it makes sense. In a way SOA already bridges the .Net and J2EE worlds and it will do so even better as time goes by and as software a service (SaaS) becomes the ruling architecture for building software. Oracle already offers a variety of ways to tie .Net services to J2EE applications using Web services and the BPEL Process Manager.

- Let's see how JBoss' biggest supporters (OSS advocates) and strongest partners (such as MySQL) react to this rather surprising news. MySQL cannot be happy about this alliance which makes JBoss look friendly to SQL Server. These are the people (OSS community + partners) who made JBoss who they are today and pissing them off could be costly. They may consider switching horses and transfer their support onto Geronimo, Jonas/RedHat, Tomcat, etc.

- Last, history shows us that getting too close to Microsoft is very rarely a good thing especially when they hate what you stand for Java and open source. I can still hear Steve Ballmer calling open source "cancer" or saying "We compete with products. We don't compete with movements." Microsoft is like a female praying mantis. The female mantis often kills and eats the male immediately after or even during mating. So my advice to JBoss is to enjoy the love while it lasts.

Microsoft vs. Mass - Episode II

2005-09-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to my previous blog entry I thought I would share with you another episode of the Microsoft vs. OpenDocument fight. After the state of Massachusetts' final decision to kick Microsoft out of roughly 50,000 desktop PCs, Alan Yates General Manager with Microsoft wrote a letter to Eric Kriss (Secretary of the Executive Office for Administration and Finance) and Peter Quinn CIO of the state (and copied the state governor) to ask them to reconsider their choice claiming that they needed to do more research and that StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and KOffice were all one code base therefore not giving them as much choice as they thought they would get and questioning the validity of OpenDocument as a "standard". He also mentioned all the efforts being made by Microsoft to inject XML (read: a proprietary flavor of XML that cannot be exchanged with any non-Microsoft product except maybe some partners like SAP via Mendocino), etc.

The KOffice team replied on the popular Slashdot. I recommend reading Alan Yates' letter as well as the KOffice team response. But this clearly shows that even if Mass is far from being Microsoft's only Windows/Office customer they don't want to see this happen all over the planet as more government bodies in the US and elsewhere are showing serious interest in OpenDocument and industry standards as a way to increase their choice and maintain their sovereignty. They rightfully feel that proprietary technologies are at odds with sovereignty.

My opinion is very much the same as what Massachusetts state officials explained, they have no problem with companies maintaining their intellectual property and selling software products like Microsoft Office, the real problem is the output (documents produced) by that software need to allow for easy exchange/interoperability and there is no better way to accomplish that than sticking with industry standards. Mass officials were pretty clear with what they meant by standards:

It must have no or absolutely minimal legal restrictions attached to it
It must be published and subject to peer review
It must be subject to joint stewardship

First Microsoft needs to drop its patents on the file formats, publish more openly the standard so it's publicly available for peer review, and make current and future versions subject to joint stewardship, after all this is done Mass officials promised they would reconsider Microsoft as a potential solution provider. That sounds perfectly fair to me!

As a result of this Mass vs. Microsoft healthy debate, Microsoft apparently stepped on its pride by making the license to the Office file formats perpetual and royalty-free. The state of Mass announced that the licensing decision by Microsoft is great but there are other sticking points such as future costs such as upgrading costs. The next version of Office will most likely not run on Windows 2K and they'll have to upgrade a ton of operating systems to XP (the state has ~ 80K employees)… This might be the beginning of the end of the unquestioned dominance of the Win/Office pair, may competition begin! Mass is saying there’s got to be a better way.

Will OpenDocument Affect the Desktop Landscape?

2005-09-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

We are used to news about Microsoft loosing accounts to open source but the winner is usually Linux and it's typically on the server and I have quite a few blog entries about Linux displacing Windows especially in governments and more often than not in Europe and emerging countries. So why am I interested in this news? Simply because so many of us are frustrated with the lack of competition and innovation on the desktop, therefore it is refreshing to hear news like the one we heard this week. The state of Massachusetts has decided to kick Microsoft out of their provisioning system which will affect about 50,000 desktop PCs that will have to be migrated to products that comply with the OpenDocument standard. Such products include OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace. Oracle Collaboration suite will probably join this list of OpenDocument supporters soon.

Microsoft which dominates the desktop/office market has said it is expanding the use of XML in its desktop products but does not intend to support the OpenDocument format. The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is a standardized XML-based file format specification for office applications. It defines requirements needed by text documents as well as spreadsheets, or graphical documents. For more information about OpenDocument read this FAQ. IBM said this week that more governments are seriously considering OpenDocument products to replace Microsoft Office including some Norway, Denmark and Japan, as well as other U.S. state governments.

Microsoft's answer to this news is simple; it's using impressive numbers to make this event irrelevant: Along with Windows, the Office suite is one of two cash cows for the software maker. The vast majority of the company's profits come from those two products. MS Office, which is upgraded about every three years and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, brought in more than $11 billion last year, or about 28 percent of Microsoft's total revenue.

For Microsoft, the need for innovation and compelling new releases becomes critical. Earlier this month, Microsoft offered developers a preview at the its plans for the next version of Office, code-named Office 12 slated for release in the second half of next year (something tells me we won't see it before mid/late 2007). Office 12 is supposed to increase workers' productivity by better making sense of ever-growing amounts of data. Office 12 will offer with Excel the ability to create dashboards and scorecards that offer a quick way to visually keep track of how a business is doing. In PowerPoint, Office 12 will help automate more of the graphics features from within the presentation program so users can create better looking documents without much design effort. Finally, Office 12 is supposed to introduce much closer ties between office products (such as Word and Excel) and Microsoft's server software which is pretty scary. This will make documents less interoperable with other products, less portable and even more proprietary.

In conclusion, I can't repeat this enough; I am as far from communism as can be. I am all for commercial software and rewarding innovation in fact, my paycheck comes from a company that does a great job at building and selling software. However my employer is a huge supporter of open standards and increasingly involved with the open source community.

What decisions like the one made by the state of Massachusetts (especially if we see more of them in the coming months) are certainly going to push Microsoft to innovate and consider interoperability more seriously by adopting standards like OpenDocument. My opinion is simple, if Microsoft has the best office suite, they should have no problem supporting open standards for document exchange and compete in an open environment. Even if it is tempting to keep an absolute monopoly on the desktop market, the last thing Microsoft wants to do is turn a blind eye to threats like open source or industry standards.

Sorry, Oracle IS OPEN

2005-09-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

After attending Oracle Open World earlier this week and listening to Charles' keynote and a series of sessions, I was happy to hear the word open (standards) so many times. I wanted to do my part and set the record straight about something Oracle is unfairly labeled as: the idea that unlike its competitors, Oracle is not a supporter of industry standards and produces proprietary software to lock customers in and trap them forever.

Here are some of the reasons why I think this is non-sense and that Oracle is much more OPEN than many people out there think.

1- Oracle is a major supporter of industry standards. Every component of Oracle Fusion Middleware as well as JDeveloper is 100% compliant with standards. The Faces support is JSR 127 compliant; the EJB support is JSR 220 compliant in fact Oracle's implementation is the base for the EJB3.0 reference implementation (RI). Oracle Fusion Middleware and tools also support J2EE 1.4, Java 5.0 as well as BPEL, JBI, JAX*, WS-I, WS-Security and more.

2- Oracle has also announced the "Hot-Pluggable Architecture" which allows IT organization to leverage their existing infrastructure investment by mixing and matching Oracle technologies with technologies from other vendors. What this means concretely is as long as other vendors comply with standards, Oracle products will seamlessly support and work with them. A good example would be Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Toplink or Oracle Portal (JSR 168 compliant) all run today on BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere or JBoss.

3- Oracle Fusion Middleware works well with non-Oracle databases including IBM DB2, Sybase or Microsoft SQL Server.

4- Oracle announced this week that Oracle's packaged applications will run natively (without modification) on the majority of IBM WebSphere middleware and its MQ messaging software, including its application server and portal, plus their recently announced Process Server. In other words, Oracle is opening its apps (#1 in the market - even in CRM with the addition of Siebel) layer natively to non-Oracle middleware.

5- Oracle Fusion Middleware also interoperates nicely with Microsoft .Net services. For example, Oracle BPEL PM seamlessly consumes .Net services. This can also be done from JDeveloper which support .Net services discovery and binding.

6- Oracle is a big believer in composite applications we already have many customers using Oracle tools and middleware to develop and deploy SOA-based applications. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) simply cannot work without interoperability and industry standards across the board. You cannot be 100% behind SOA like Oracle is and ignore standards. It doesn’t make sense.

7- Last but not least, (this is my favorite as you can imagine) Oracle is actively increasing its involvement in the open source community (beyond Linux) in a number of ways:

a. First of all I am here to help build a vibrant open source community around our tools and middleware projects.

b. Oracle is leading 3 of Eclipse projects (under WTP and ETP) and we have been joined by numerous vendors (such as IBM, BEA and JBoss) to collaborate on enhancing the design time experience more specifically in the areas of JSF, EJB3.0 and BPEL.

c. Oracle is currently working with Apache to contribute a rich set of JSF-compliant user interface components. These components are expected to join the Apache MyFaces project. Expect this contribution to make a big impact on modern web application development (aka rich clients – AJAX style). I can see some of you drooling!

d. Oracle middleware and tools are certified to work with a number of very popular open source projects such as Ant, CVS, JUnit, Log4J, Struts, Spring, XDoclet, Axis, MyFaces and more.

e. Oracle has been a tremendous supporter of Linux for many years. In fact, Oracle was the first commercial database available on Linux. Oracle's Unbreakable Linux support offering includes Linux operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Novell SUSE, and Asianux. For more on this visit Oracle's Linux FAQ or oss.oracle.com. Also check out what Oracle’s support of PHP.

In summary, I talked about how Oracle's middleware and tools are 100% behind standards, how they interoperate with non-Oracle products from competing vendors or open source and finally I mentioned briefly Oracle's involvement with the open source community (expect much more blogging on this). If some of you still think that Oracle is not willing to compete in an open environment (where the door is wide open to "Hot-swappable" non-Oracle products), using industry standards and supporting open source where appropriate; I am happy to hear from them and kick off a healthy debate.

Moving on... Back to Oracle

2005-09-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

As most of you have probably heard by now, I left Orbeon a few weeks ago. I'm off to see if I can make an impact at Oracle, a company which has benefitted hugely from Free and open source software. Oracle is definitely ready to commit to open source by dedicating resources and contributing IP. I'm quite sad to leave my great friends at Orbeon where I got used to working with extremely talented people. Change is always hard but change is good.

I'm very excited to re-join Oracle! I met some people at Eclipse World (where I gave a keynote last week) and they couldn't believe somebody was hired at Oracle as the Chief Open Source Evangelist. One attendee told me "Oracle and open source just don't go together". Let's face it; Oracle is known as an active contributor to the JCP. Oracle has also been known as a big supporter of OSS on the consuming side. But the reality is that when it comes to development tools and middleware, Oracle is behind on the giving back side. Well, we are working on that and I am here to change this perception. We have already started with a few Eclipse and Apache projects where we have taken the lead and have been joined by vendors like IBM, BEA, JBoss and Exadel. This is just the beginning. Soon Oracle will be the largest software vendor actively involved with the open source community. I am sure there will be challenges for me at Oracle but I couldn't be more enthusiastic about my role in the company as well as in the OSS community.

Stay tuned!

Out for 4 weeks

2005-07-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

My blogging activities are going to be very limited for the next 4 weeks. Thanks for your loyalty and come back late August / early September for more stories/opinions/rants on Open for Business!

M$FT and OSS: the cat and mouse game

2005-07-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

Steve Ballmer once decried Linux and open source as a cancer. In a recent interview, he said "We compete with products. We don't compete with movements". The reality is that that open source poses the biggest competitive threat Microsoft has ever encountered. If you've been following Microsoft's attitude toward OSS in the last year or two you may have seen some big changes. Our friends in Redmond are really softening their stance showing more willingness to start a dialogue with the open source community which shows that they finally recognize that OSS is a threat and it is here to stay.

Here are some amazing events you may have heard of:

- Last year Microsoft released some of its code under an open-source license (CPL), and posted it on SourceForge. Microsoft had made its source code available under a variety of licensing mechanisms, all under its "shared source" umbrella. Microsoft made available an internally developed product called the Windows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge. WiX is a toolset for building Windows installation packages from XML source code. The project seems to be getting on average a couple hundred downloads a day.

- Microsoft spent money earlier this year by sponsoring targeted open-source conferences. They even paid for a platinum sponsor at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) held in San Francisco.

- In April 2005, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, called for bridge building between Microsoft and the open-source community.

- Today Microsoft customers can see and control Linux servers with Microsoft's management software, and they will eventually be able to run Linux and Windows on the same machine. This is a big change from previous policies.

- Microsoft has hired a bunch of engineers who have a high profile in open-source circles. After Shaun Walker who came with his product DotNetNuke , Microsoft hired Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins, who is helping them understand open-source development. Another open source figure joined Microsoft, Jim Hugunin, is working on the IronPython project to support the Python scripting language that Microsoft would like to support in .Net to better compete with the LAMP stack.

- Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) declared that Microsoft may be shipping their apps on top of Linux sooner than we think.

- In earlier this month (July 2005), Microsoft surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show by allowing a third party to present a "hands-on lab" that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software. Is Microsoft toning down it anti-Linux crusade? Probably not! Just trying to get some PR and play nice by using some diplomacy with OSS community.

I could go on and on but this clearly shows a change in Microsoft's attitude. So why are they doing all this? Can the OSS community finally trust M$FT?

Some believe Microsoft needs to change its image especially in areas where OSS is taking off big time such as developing countries (see my post on Brazil) and Europe (see my post on Norway or these telling headlines). Microsoft has to play well with OSS in these regions (especially Linux servers). Most RedHat or Novell Suse customers have Microsoft products in house. Microsoft has to appear open to both proprietary and open source software.

Once again I am a firm believer in rewarding companies and developers for their work on software. I am all for commercial software so I am not expecting or asking Microsoft to open source Windows (or any of their core products) just like I wouldn't expect Oracle to open source their database. It would be insane and suicidal. All these conciliatory statements and gestures with the OSS world are revolting and repulsive to me. I will accept them when Microsoft acts differently. Here are some things Microsoft could do to change their position toward open source and standards. First of all don't send a lawyer to build bridges with the open source community, they don't like lawyers. Secondly, stop impeding standard efforts, Microsoft has a pretty bad history of hijacking standards (Kerberos is an example) and making them proprietary. There are similar stories/issues with W3C standards. Secondly they should get inspired by IBM who donated over 500 patents to the OSS community earlier this year. Instead Microsoft continues to use its patents weapon. Another one and I'll leave it at that is opening up their formats (like Word) and stop suing people who write software that interoperates with these formats.

Until I see Microsoft implement some of the actions I mentioned above I will continue to think that they are reaching out to the OSS community to better understand their enemy before strangling it. Only this time the enemy is not a smaller vendor, it is distributed globally, growing fast and very hard to fight. So let's see how this plays out, this time around the cat may have some difficulties catching and killing the mouse, just like the cartoon Tom & Jerry.

Keeping the pulse on the Mobile space

2005-07-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

One of the privileges of living in Silicon Valley is the variety of events (networking, technology, funding, etc.) that are available to me at a stone's throw distance. Lately I've been following the wireless/mobile industry quite a bit for a variety of reasons.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this website: www.mobilemonday.com so I decided to check it out. This week it was hosted at AOL a few blocks from where I work. Cool!

Everyone at this event loves gadgets and owns the latest/coolest cell phone on the market and uses it for voice/data/games and much more… I looked like a boring beginner with my lame Treo 600 exclusively used for voice and email.

Okay, here are some of my notes on the companies who presented this month:

- Rodney Aiglstorfer with mFoundry showed two applications built with their tools. They have a server side platform (mWorks), Eclipse-based plug-ins and an onset module that runs Moblets on the phone. Their claim to fame is that they were able to produce mobile versions of complicated Web sites in two weeks using their know-how and their toolset. I am going to check out their technologies, it sounds intriguing to me. In addition to some proprietary aspects (Moblets, MIL, etc.) of their offering, they seem to support a limited number of devices, which means they've got a long way to go to cover the masses.

- Next up we got a demo of Airena's Airset. These guys think that the email for mobile phones/PDAs is a crowded space, however, they see an opportunity for a centralized management of your calendars and your address books and have that delivered to you wherever/whenever. It's an SMS-based access to multiple groups from your phone. They also have a web-based app that allows you to enter your profiles and set up your groups. It is true that sometimes I get frustrated with some limitations in Yahoo Calendar and Yahoo Addresses but I am not sure it is painful enough for me to look for other solutions. The demo was pretty cool, not sure I will use it.

- Next up was Mike Li from 6^th Sense Communications. I really liked this presentation because I had this idea a couple of years ago and started thinking about ways to solve the same problem but it's not one of those things you can do on the side. In a way they are after the same market as Dodgeball (a two people start up recently acquired by Google). In fact they are using the same look and feel but not the same technologies. Dodgeball doesn't need Bluetooth whereas 6^th Sense relies on Bluetooth to find people around you. So what's cool about these two companies? You set up your profiles (professional profile, dating profile, etc.) and as you walk around town or go to events or to a bar, your phone tells you that the VC you were looking for is just a few feet away or the hot brunette of your dreams with the same interests you have is in the same bar, etc. It can also be used for advertisement, if you walk by a Starbucks everyday they can send you a 50% discount on your favorite drink as you walk by the store, wouldn't that make you want to buy a latte? IMHO 6th Sense should consider integrating ASAP with Friendster, LinkedIn and Myspace. Peopla hate typing their profiles over and over again. I could go on and on, I think it's pretty cool!

- Next was a boring (sorry) presentation by the not-so-motivated BuddyBuzz guys. They have implemented a pre-alpha software for your phone/PDA that allows you to read fast using the RSVP technique out of Stanford.

- Then we had a demo of fotochatter, an SMS-based service to send your favorite freshly taken photo to a group of friends and get their comments back… Not sure if these guys are trying to make a business out of this (I hope not) but the demo was cool. They have a Java version (with a better handling of the image size based on your specific device) as well a WAP version. They also offer a Web-based interface to create your profile, your groups and read all the messages/comments you get back from your buddies.

- Dale Larson from ipsh! Presented their solution for marketing campaigns (delivering wallpapers, promotions or ring tones) using an SMS-based technology. They seem to be doing pretty well and they can do mass or targeted marketing with a claimed 20% to 60% response rate which (if true) is a terrific rate.

- Natasha Minenko Flaherty with Immersion Corporation presented the VibeTonz System includes two products: VibeTonz Studio SDK, a complete software development kit for creating touch effects, and VibeTonz Mobile Player, an effect player which is embedded in the mobile handset. They essentially allow developers to precisely control the vibration motor on your device to add as much realism to your phone experience as possible. I am not going to use any of those products anytime soon, primarily because I am not a gamer and it adds more value to games than anything else (MHO). This said one of the benefits or her demo is that I realized how far behind we are (in America) compared to Japan or Korea. One of the demos loaded a 60MB game on a crazy SK Telecom phone, it looked so good and felt so real I thought we were looking at an Xbox demo.

- Last we saw a couple of demos from Dhana Pawar with TeleCommunication Systems. The first demo was built for Rand McNally Traffic, it provides real-time traffic updates on the phone. This includes speed and accident info in a map, list and SMS format. This app was a finalist in the Best Info category at the BREW conference in San Diego.

All in all I thought it was time very well spent. I learned a ton about the technologies used to build applications targeted at our phones and PDAs. I also got a an idea of what startups in this space are trying to build here in Silicon Valley. BTW most of the applications we saw this month are free; make sure you try them out. Some presenters were not really sure how they were going to monetize their creations yet. I will definitely attend the next MobileMonday and recommend it to anybody interested in innovation and creativity in the Mobile space.

If you would like to check out some Mobile Monday pictures, here is their Flickr tag.

Microsoft? Nor Way!

2005-07-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about the growing open source wave in developing countries and how using OSS helped some of them realize much needed savings.

How about other governments who can afford to buy software, why are they encouraging, and sometimes even enforcing the use of OSS?

I mentioned in a few blog entries that several European governments (including the U.K., Italy and Germany) were encouraging the use of open source. Today I read this article on InfoWorld that talks about a country with a much stronger stance against proprietary software. It's a rather wealthy country: Norway.

Norwegian officials are quoted saying things like: proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government… and adding that this would be the last time they make a presentation available on the Net with proprietary media software (talking about PowerPoint and Excel). Even though they tend not to name Microsoft specifically it’s pretty obvious. It's funny to see that despite all this, the Norwegian government works closely with Bill Gates on worthy charitable projects.

Why do you think all these countries are on a crusade to destroy Microsoft? Is it really about savings? Or freedom? Are they jealous of Microsoft's (and to a larger extent American software vendors) dominance and want to break free from America’s lock on the global software industry? Do they believe OSS is much safer and offers better quality software?

The cool image used in this post was borrowed from Gentoo.no

Brazil: the hearth of FOSS

2005-07-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

I wrote a couple of pieces on the global wave of legislation which is inducing government-owned agencies and companies, to use FOSS except when proprietary software is the only option. This wave is primarily seen in Europe and developing countries. Some of the reasons behind this phenomenon are obvious (such as cost savings) and some are more subtle. Some experts believe there is a clear desire to break free from the U.S.' lock on the global software market/industry. Analysts say concerns about autonomy and national security are likely to drive passage of more laws discouraging use of proprietary software. Proponents of this wave like to call it "software libre" to describe software that is not only free but whose development is not controlled by a single organization/company.

One of the first developing countries to clearly stand behind OSS was Brazil. For the last five years Brazil’s government lead by President Lula is abandoning proprietary software (mainly Windows) in favor of OSS. Sergio Amadeu who runs the National Institute for Information Technology estimates a $500 saving in software for every machine owned/operated by the government which saves Brazil overall $150M a year. These savings allow Lula's government to sponsor new machines as well as recycled machines and distribute them in the favelas (very poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Sao Paulo and Rio).

The trend could be troubling to software giants like Microsoft, which has eyed the proliferation of open-source software nervously despite the fact that it still controls about 90% of the planet's desktops. Earlier this year Bill Gates tried to meet with President Lula privately at the World Economic Forum in Davos but he was unsuccessful. Following this, Microsoft released a stripped down (cheaper) version of Windows XP in Brazil…

Finally last month FISL (stands for Fórum Internacional do Software Livre) 6.0 took place in Porto Alegre Brazil with prestigious sponsors and speakers. Thousands of enthusiasts got together to discuss how OSS could help them build their country. More on this by Bloomberg.

It's also refreshing to see that Iraq is also taking advantage of OSS. BBC reported that Linux user groups are being created with hundreds of members.

Finally I would like to reiterate for those who read my blog for the first time that I am not an anti-Microsoft or an anti-proprietary/commercial software guy. We all have to make a living. I support OSS because I believe it forces software vendors to innovate and constantly add value. Also I am intrigued by the collaborative and distributed aspects of OSS which inspire and influence the development processes of several commercial vendors. More importantly, I like OSS because it allows some developing countries who cannot afford to pay Microsoft $500 per machine to get the ball rolling and provide computer and internet access for the disadvantaged.

Java: stuck since 1998

2005-07-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

If you were like me, wondering why we got stuck with the number/version 2 in the names of the Java platforms… In a recent post on his blog, Graham Hamilton announced the new names for the Java platforms. In a nutshell they are dropping the "2" in J2SE, J2EE and J2ME. Even though this announcement is nowhere as important or desirable as open sourcing Java once and for all, I still welcome it. Why would we call Java standard edition version 5.0: J2SE?

The reality is that Sun introduced J2SE and J2EE in 1998 to break away from Java's first generation and got stuck with it as a brand.

If you'd like to read more about the new naming system, go to:
java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaone2005/naming.html

Top analyst with Gartner got it completely wrong

2005-07-07T17:10:00.000-07:00

I read this article on ZDNet today titled Is open source stifling innovation instead?

I disagree with 99% of what I read so I decided to share my opinion on it hoping to get yours as well. The quotes listed below come from Bob Hayward a Sr VP with Gartner Research. He supposedly is a prominent market analyst.

1- Developers could be discouraged from creating new software because of the multitude of open-source software available for free. This is further driven by major vendors that are making their software available as open source. Many of the big software vendors are now evaluating all the software products they produce and identifying those that are strategic to the company, and those that are becoming commoditized. After they have singled out a software offering which is not core or strategic to their business, or perhaps which is not making money in the market, they then make it open source.

I can't believe Gartner actually pays people a ton of money to say such things. This is actually saying the opposite. Small companies and individuals have an opportunity to innovate because they can leverage the work and R&D from big companies just by looking at and using their open source infrastructure software. Why would anybody innovate in a commoditized area? I believe that open source is actually pushing all the industry to constantly innovate. Vendors who cannot add value and stay at the top of the stack are naturally eliminated. In a way it's Darwinian and it's fine with me. The fact that we have JBoss and Tomcat today is forcing BEA to innovate, if they can't find the next growth area they will either have to open source their stack (like Sun just did) and potentially become a service play or die. Linux is pushing Microsoft to think about what they should do to keep their lead on the desktop and the list goes on and on.

2- Let's say some smart kid wants to write the world's greatest piece of software, but (he has) got two problems now. One, he has got to be careful not to be in the way of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle or SAP. If you're on their road, you could be roadkill. Two to make money out of this commercial software, he has all these free, open-source software that he has got to try to navigate through. This young developer, in order to ensure his product is unique and marketable, would have to check that it is not similar to another open-source software that is already available in the market.

That's called competition! This kid is not that smart if he doesn't study all competition open source or not. And yes if there is an open source solution to the problem he is trying to address he should either do something else or leverage the existing OSS solution and add value on top of it or make it easier to use/manage, less rough on the edges or enterprise quality, etc.

3- Bob is skeptical about the spate of big software vendors giving away the source codes of their products. They are very rational and pragmatic about it. It's good PR (public relations) and they seem to be good corporate citizens giving these contributions to the world. Most of the time though what they're doing is offloading a burden, and basically asking the open-source communities to take on that project.

I happen to agree with Bob on the PR aspect but I completely disagree with everything else. This is where you see that Bob has no idea how OSS works. Nobody's offloading software on the community with realistic hopes that the project will become a success. At Orbeon we have open sourced PresentationServer a year ago. If we didn't have our own staff 100% involved in the development of new features, fixing bugs, writing documentation and examples, the project would have been dead. You may get some testing for free from the community or a patch here and there but people the majority of people don't go farther that that. All big vendors who have open sourced a product (including Sun with OpenSolaris or Oracle with the EJB3.0 RI or JSF components) keep the developers on their payroll, otherwise they might as well terminate it won’t go anywhere on its own.

In conclusion I can't believe what I read from Gartner, I certainly think OSS has changed the way distributed teams collaborate to write/package/sell software, but I strongly believe OSS is actually playing a positive role in the software market by keeping all software vendors on their toes and weeding out those who cannot stay ahead of the innovation curve.

What do you think?

The scripting tsunami

2005-07-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

In the last decade, the enterprise software world has been divided between the Microsoft .Net and the Java/J2EE platforms. In case you haven’t noticed this is changing!

A tsunami is a natural phenomenon consisting of a series of waves generated when water is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. Tsunamis tend to happen very quietly, even people on the shore don't see them coming. Typically the warning sign is when water receded many hundred meters from the coast only to come back much stronger and cause massive destruction.

I like to use the tsunami analogy to describe what's happening with the LAMP stack and scripting languages. The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, PHP, and/or Python) has become a viable alternative to Java and .Net. LAMP's emergence is fueled by a growing third-party industry and by IT organizations' rising interest in open source.

What are scripting languages?
Generally they are interpreted languages that feature higher productivity than traditional compiled languages like C or C++. Due in part to the dynamic nature of interpreters, one line of scripting code will do more for you than a line of C or Java. There are a couple of distinctive categories of scripting languages. General purpose scripting languages like Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk can be used to solve any problem you may have while Web programming scripting languages like PHP or JavaScript will help you put together your Web pages or add richness to your plain HTML front-end.

Why are they so popular?
Simply because the learning curve is much more reasonable than that of Java/J2EE or C++. Also, scripting languages are much more rewarding; a few lines of PHP or JavaScript can take you a long way. Amazing PHP-based portals pop up everyday and the recent frenzy around the AJAX architecture fueled and validated by Google Maps and Google suggest add to JavaScript's popularity. Finally scripting languages empower less skilled programmers (who identify themselves as scripters or self-taught) and enables other categories of people to participate and do their job including writers, editors, catalogers and other content specialists.

When should I avoid them?
The speed at which computers operate has increased dramatically over the years while the delta in performance between interpreters and compilers has remained pretty much flat. This means that scripting languages are excluded from fewer applications for performance reasons. This said there will always be applications that demand optimal coding in compiled languages (and sometimes assembly). For example, highly transactional / high volume online applications or writing device drivers are not good candidates for scripting languages.

Recent partnership (with Zend) announcements by IBM and Oracle are a very strong validation of PHP and sends a clear signal that these two software giants are acknowledging the success of scripting language PHP (considered so far as a prototyping technology to build mock-ups). Clearly IBM and Oracle are trying to defend their database turf. They got tired watching the "M" in the LAMP stack slowly but surely gaining popularity.

Is this a threat to Java?
Even if JavaOne this year was a very disappointing/empty show, I don't think Java will go away anytime soon. Both scripting languages and Java (or .Net) will be around for a while. Despite the apparent overlap, I think they serve different purposes for different categories of programmers. We will always need different tools/languages for different jobs. Scripting proponents argue that tools built around languages such as Python or PHP are gaining in popularity because Java development is too complex for many jobs. This is not totally true I am pleased with the progress Eclipse is making and I have to say that I am impressed with Oracle JDeveloper’s latest version now available for free!

This said Java vendors and the Java community need to continue their quest to simplify the developer's experience and open up as much as possible otherwise the Scripters' tsunami will be more damaging.

Sun Microsystems on an open source spree

2005-07-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

This week at JavaOne 2005 Sun Microsystems announced more open source initiatives following the Solaris announcement. Check out the GlassFish project.

I am happy to report that I heard "open source" at JavaOne almost as many times as Java. Thomas Kurian announced during his keynote Oracle's recent open source contributions to myFaces and EJB3.0, BEA's CTO talked about their collaboration with Spring and Geronimo (no mention of JBoss of course) and finally Sun open sourced its Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 as well as Java Open Enterprise Service Bus (Open ESB). A couple of years ago I would have been very excited for the Java community to see this coming out of Sun but today I see it more as noise and confusion than anything else. Think about it, we got JBoss, Geronimo (J2EE certified this week), Tomcat, Java System Application Server Platform, JonAS and more. I am not sure too much choice is a good thing. Pretty soon BEA will announce Weblogic is open source too, they are not making money with this product anymore; in fact they aren't making money period!

Competition is good but if the only objective was to serve the Java/J2EE community and to create a strong open source J2EE platform, I would suggest that all (or most) of these open source app server initiatives unite to build a rock solid platform. The truth is every one of these projects has a different agenda and it's not always about serving the Java community. I can't wait to see some consolidation among open source app servers. I don't think J2EE developers need a dozen app servers; they want a couple that work very well and fit their requirements. Choice is good but too much choice is confusion.

This said I am quite excited about the ESB announcement I hope it's a good piece of technology, judging by the success of Sonic Software ESB-based architectures are becoming mainstream which means it's a good time to see open source ESBs in the market.

Want to write OSS this summer? Talk to Google.

2005-06-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

Apparently Google is still trying to come up with a strategy for OSS. They are growing the number of open source projects (about 9 projects today). This said, intentionally (or not) their OSS projects are still very much under the radar. The statistics on sourceforge.net show very low activity across the board. Given Orbeon's interest in XML technologies and AJAX, I am particularly interested in following the AJAXSLT project (freshly posted on 6/8/05).

This summer Google is promoting the summer of code Program, their latest open source initiative which consists of giving out a $4,500 prize to students who successfully complete an OSS project with a sponsoring organization. This program displays quite a few prestigious sponsoring organizations from the OSS world such as The Apache Software Foundation, mozdev.org or FreeBSD.

This is a smart initiative for Google, it will cost Google peanuts while giving them a wonderful recruiting tool and who knows (I don't think this is their primary objective given their already talented/creative staff) new ideas? In addition to being a lethal magnet for talented students wanting to work for the "coolest" company of the moment, this initiative will also help promote Google as an OSS friendly company. Plus, who doesn't want to be associated with OSS these days?

For more information check the program's FAQ.

Open source to go

2005-06-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

Apple is assisting Nokia in creating their new Series 60 browser based on the same KHTML open source technology that powers Apple's Safari. The new Series 60 browser will be available during the first half of 2006.

Apple has recently increased its open source participation after complaints were raised by Web browser coders (KHTML developers) that the computer maker wasn't contributing as much as it was taking from the open-source group.

Nokia's chief strategy officer Tero Ojanpera declared that "Open-source software is an interesting phenomenon; it is not new for Nokia, we are more and more using open source in our developments."

Two years ago, Nokia invested in Minimo, Mozilla Foundation's project to create a phone browser based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Minimo is supposed to be out this summer with its version 0.1 browser for use on Windows CE.

At Orbeon, we would obviously like to see more interest around XForms for mobile devices/ applications. Oracle and IBM have shown some good signs in this direction but I am not sure what their commitment to XForms on Mobile devices really is.

Read more on this news.

What are Gartner's hottest topics this year?

2005-06-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

Gartner came out this week with its picks for 2005. The hottest topics this year include open source software, voice/data convergence, service-oriented architecture, IT utility, and global sourcing.

I am not surprised to see that open source is one of the hottest topics in software this year and I wouldn't be surprised if it stays up there for the next few years. However I am still impressed by these numbers: "By 2008 95% of Global 2000 organizations will have formal open-source acquisition and management strategies; and, OSS applications will directly compete with closed-source products in every software infrastructure market. By 2010, IT organizations in Global 2000 companies will consider open-source products in 80% of their infrastructure-focused software investments and 25 percent of their business software investments."

Read the full press release.

New battlefield for OSS middleware

2005-05-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't want to crack the rising Asian market? China for example is the place where all businesses would love to make it. With all the cash they have and a fast growing middle class, China's buying power is very attractive. All this is obvious but what's kind of new is the attention Asia is getting from the open source world. Red Hat has opened a new office in Beijing late last year while Novell is pushing their Linux distribution in China via the local China Linux Standards Group.

How about OSS Middleware?
Earlier this month I wrote a piece on ObjectWeb's partnership with the powerful Guangzhou Middleware Research Center (GMRC) to increase the adoption of JonAS in China. The ObjectWeb consortium is also sponsoring Vietnam's COSGov conference on use of open source in e-government. All this was happening when JBoss was busy trying to figure out what impact was IBM's acquisition of Gluecode going to have on them. But JBoss couldn't ignore ObjectWeb's attempt to conquer the Asian market, they came out with a similar announcement today. JBoss is teaming up with Nomura Research Institute (NRI) to promote deployments of JBoss's Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS), making JEMS a "safe choice" for Asian enterprise customers. "This partnership with NRI is a crucial step in our expansion into Asia. As Japan's largest consulting firm and system integrator, NRI has the breadth and depth to help JBoss extend JEMS to countless enterprises across the continent." said Bob Bickel, VP of strategy and corporate development with JBoss. NRI will provide professional support, systems integration and management services while JBoss will provide NRI with development support, training and professional certification. Earlier this month JBoss opened its India office in Bangalore.

After a clear victory for JBoss in the US and a little more disputed competition in EU, let's see how the OSS middleware battle plays out in Asia. Keep in mind that even a small success in Asia (especially China) can grow JBoss or JonAS’s community by millions of fresh users.

What's cooler than ice? Google Maps

2005-05-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought web applications were never going to be as rich and responsive as desktop applications, out came Google Maps to prove me wrong. To make it happen, Google used a new approach/pattern to web application design called AJAX (stands for Asynchronous JavaScript & XML). I will write a piece soon on Ajax and its technical advantages as well as its shortcomings, but let me just say that Ajax is truly transforming the Web as we know it. In addition to Google Maps, note that Google Suggest, Gmail, Amazon's A9 and Yahoo's Flickr are already Ajax-based. Orbeon is working on an incredible Ajax engine using XForms. Stay tuned!

Enough about Ajax, let's get back to Google Maps and the amazing user-driven creativity (that many call "hacks") around it. Google Maps turned out to be much more than a place people go to for directions. The addition of satellite images and the nice graphics opened up a whole new world for people who used their imagination. I am going to try and list a few hacks I thought were very cool (and most of the time useful).

- I will start with one of my favorites (already wrote a post on this one). HousingMaps is a great integration between Craigslist and Google Maps. Try it; it's simple and very useful especially when you're looking for a new home in areas you don't necessarily know well.

- This one is called ChicagoCrime. I wish we had one for Silicon Valley so I can see what's going on in my neighborhood. These guys take feeds of data on crimes throughout the city and overlay them on Google Maps by neighborhood and type and even provide RSS feeds. One can imagine combining such a service with the HousingMaps service to inform people of crime activity in certain areas which may influence their neighborhood choice.

- Gas is not a cheap commodity anymore. Check out Cheap Gas a very cool mix of Gas buddy and Google Maps. Just select your city and start saving money on Gas. Make sure you click on the Satellite link; it'll overlay the Gas stations on a nice aerial view of the area.

- The same people behind the Cheap Gas application have integrated Google Maps with the popular movie site IMDb. Make sure you try this one out.

- If you are a lazy tourist or can't afford to go to Honolulu, here is a cheap sightseeing solution for you: Google Sightseeing. Browse the best tourist spots in the world by locality or by category and Google Maps' satellites will take you there.

- A former Tivo engineer developed a Tivo interface to Google Maps. This one is kind of cool but I tend to have my computer (Wi-Fi connected) with me on the couch when I watch TV. Not sure I want to use my TV set for this. Now everyone knows I'm a couch potato.

- This one comes from the source itself (Google Labs). It's called Ride Finder and it helps you find a cab in your area. They track real time vehicle location (see the button in the bottom) so you know how close they are from you.

- How about blending Google Maps with Yahoo's Flickr to displays the location (on a Google map or a precise satellite picture) of where the pictures were taken? Daniel Catt just put it together Geobloggers. Users can plug the longitude and latitude of locations of their Flickr photos into Geobloggers and tag those photos with the name of the city within Flickr. When you are ready to document your road trip, check out this post by Mark Jaquith that provides step-by-step help to use this great service.

- This one is not necessarily a hack but it shows that Google Maps may be used for advertising. Check out this pool with a big Pepsi sign (zoom in on the pool) near an airport in AZ.

Google doesn't have an official position on these nice services hacked by individual users. They will have to come up with one soon. In my opinion they should encourage these imaginative people as much as possible by offering tools, open APIs and loose licensing terms for their mapping capabilities.

Strategic use of open source against competition

2005-05-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, I read two different announcements that are interconnected in a way.

The first one is from CA announcing the winners of the Ingres million dollar challenge. I don’t really care about the challenge or the winners; I am more interested in what CA is trying to accomplish. They are effectively funding tools that migrate just about anything to their open source database Ingres. It is no surprise that the #1 prize went to a team who developed an Oracle to Ingres tool and the second prize goes to a Microsoft SQL Server-to-Ingres tool. The third one is a bit more interesting (competition within OSS), it migrates MySQL users to Ingres. More details on the results can be found here.

The second announcement is another migration story. This one comes from IBM teaming up with Red Hat to hurt more threatening competitors (Sun and HP). IBM and Red Hat are launching a bunch of Solaris-to-Linux Migration Initiatives including free assessment services provided by IBM as well as educational materials to help customers migrate. This isn't a new initiative at IBM. Three thousand of their 12,000 Linux customers come from Solaris. IBM has completed more than 500 HP/UX and Solaris-to-AIX customer migration engagements since early 2004.

IBM wants to sell hardware and services; they need to go after HP and Sun to make some room for their profitable eServers. Linux (open source in general) is a great weapon in IBM's arsenal, they have been using it knowledgeably for years (especially against Microsoft/Windows). CA does not necessarily want to make money in the database business but CA's competitors certainly do. Even if CA's migration tools cannot claim as many success stories as IBM's Solaris-to-Linux (or HP/UX-to-Linux); migrating as many Oracle (IBM or Microsoft) customers to Ingres is a good strategy. It doesn't hurt to give it a try.

Geoffrey Moore's take on open source

2005-05-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Moore needs no introduction in the IT world. For the rare people who don't know him, Geoffrey Moore is a best selling author, a VC and a consultant. He is best known for his work in IT marketing and strategy. He is the author of timeless books, including Crossing the Chasm (1991), Inside the Tornado (1995), The Gorilla Game (1998) and Living on the Fault Line (2002). His books have been my bibles as an entrepreneur.

Recently, Moore spoke at OSBC 2005 on the topic of open source, I am most grateful to ITConversation for their hard work on making so many exciting talks freely available. His keynote was entitled Open Source Has Crossed the Chasm - Now What?

I will try to share with you the gist of Moore's speech but I still recommend that you take the time to listen to the man himself (slides are also available here). It's definitely worth an hour (load it on your iPod and listen when you can). When I listen to Geoffrey (or read his books), I usually don't learn new things but I learn how to look at things I knew from a new perspective that makes a whole lot of sense.

I am going to go to the bottom line of Geoffrey's keynote.

On July of 2004, Moore published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled "Darwin and the Demon: Innovating within Established Enterprises". This article introduces the principles and ideas that will be included in his next book (to be published in a few months). His new theory is for every business to identify the following:
- What's Core: this is what gives you a sustainable differentiation over your competitors and creates great value for your customers.
- What's Context: everything else

For example, if you are Domino's Pizza, your Core is not the pizza, it's your 30 minute guaranteed delivery (and pizza is your context). Pizza is your Core if you are Round Table Pizza. You get the picture?

Moore explains how companies get tied up in managing Context (which used to be their Core) and cannot extract valuable resources from managing and maintaining Context to working on their Core. That is why Kodak cannot afford to dedicate as many resources on traditional films (which used to be their Core) and have to embrace the digital photo world. They are starting to do so; their acquisition of Ofoto is an indication of their new direction.

Now where is open source in all these theories, you may ask? Well, Moore thinks that OSS is definitely happening. Popular projects like Linux, Apache and JBoss have crossed the chasm in his view.

Here is the bottom line: OSS is wonderful because it helps IT organizations take a huge amount of Context off their plate. It will vacuum mission critical Context off the table and help them focus their energy on the Core.

Moore mentions Microsoft as an example; they have to manage 30 million lines of code by themselves. Contrast that with Apple which uses a BSD-licensed flavor or Unix as the kernel of its operating system and focuses its resources on its core: building the best and the friendliest user interface on the market.

In essence Geoffrey's message is simple: Use OSS as a great (and reliable now that it has crossed the chasm) tool to manage Context and focus on your Core. Eventually, this Core will become Context, you simply move up the value chain by innovating and offering a new Core and using more OSS to take care of your commoditized Context.

Simple and enlightening, isn't it?

ObjectWeb's salvation

2005-05-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

ObjectWeb is a not-for-profit consortium co-founded in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA to foster development and adoption of next generation open-source middleware in the industry. The consortium today counts over 50 corporate (including Orbeon) and academic members from three continents and federates a community of thousand individuals from about 80 countries.

Today I read this press release that talks about ObjectWeb reaching out to China via the Guangzhou Middleware Research Center (GMRC). GMRC has about 80 researchers dedicated to developing and promoting middleware technologies, including Java application servers. For those of us who don't know Guangzhou, it's a province near Hong Kong known as one of the most technologically advanced regions in China, with 39 universities and colleges and the highest level of PC penetration in the country.

GMRC's director Hongbo Xu said that China is very serious about OSS not necessarily because of the development model or the quality of the software, but because of the "independence" it brings from foreign vendors. This confirms the trend I had talked about in this post.

ObjectWeb is best known for its open source Java application server, called JonAS. Backed and distributed by Red Hat, JonAS is still far behind the leader JBoss (backed by HP, Novell, Unisys, CA and others). I thought that this partnership with GMRC (which will provide localized software and documentation for ObjectWeb projects) to expand in China was a very smart move. We all know that an average success in China can mean millions of users. ObjectWeb is quite successful in EU but has a hard time cracking the middleware US market dominated by JBoss. Why not conquer Asia?

In this press release I also learned that the partnership goes beyond ObjectWeb and GMRC. The French and Chinese governments announced their decision to leverage open-source software to expand Sino- French scientific and industrial cooperation on information technologies. Middleware was identified as a key enabling technology for e-commerce, e-government and e-learning.

Let's see how this plays out in the mid to long term, will it really help increase ObjectWeb's popularity in Asia, an area currently dominated by IBM and BEA? Will it get JonAS closer to JBoss? It may sound like a stretch but why not?

Freedom vs. Free

2005-05-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

Open source software is definitely not free when you look at the TCO. I have said it and will repeat it: I like to look at open source from a business perspective and believe much more in Marc Fleury's Professional open source that Richard Stallman's. Just like communism, if everything about open source is free, it will ultimately collapse. The reality is engineers need to feed their families. I have nothing against companies (like JBoss or Orbeon) charging for support and maintenance services (the scalable and predictable portion of the software business).

The good news is that the whole industry today understands open source much better; and when asked what's the most important advantage in using open source, people are not jumping to the old answer: it's free! Or, it's cheap! Many studies show statistics illustrating this shift, the latest I found was conducted by Computer Economics, here are their conclusions. The gist of it is that only 22% thought that it was cheaper to adopt open source while 44% chose "less dependence on vendors". In other words, people are interested in independence and freedom more than free or cheap. I also found a definition of Free Software on GNU and it had nothing to do with price, it talks about four kinds of freedom:

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
- The freedom to redistribute copies
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

What's important to you (or the organization you work for) when considering open source solutions?

Michael Dell likes Red Hat

2005-05-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

At age 40, Michael Dell's personal wealth is estimated at $16B. Dell gave his initials to a NYC-based investment company MSD Capital which manages $10B of his fortune by investing in real estate among other areas. This week, news emerged that in January of 2004, MSD Capital decided to spend $100M to buy 3.9 million RHAT shares. Remember, Dell Inc. resells Linux software on its servers and was an early investor in Red Hat (a direct competitor to Microsoft). At first, given my respect for Michael Dell as a visionary and a business man, I read this transaction as: Red Hat is onto something very interesting. But when you think about it, MSD Capital may have made the decision to invest without Dell's involvement or blessing.

Another question I had was: does this mean that Dell Inc. is preparing the acquisition of Red Hat? But they have never acquired a software company. Would it be a smart move? I don't think so, the majority of PCs sold by Dell still run Windows, the last thing Dell wants to do is upset the Redmond titan. Unless Microsoft buys Red Hat, wouldn't that be interesting?

Also, MSD made other investments in completely different areas such as restaurant chains IHOP and Steak n Shake. So Red Hat could simply be part of a diversification strategy. Finally, since MSD's investment, RHAT shares dropped by about 45% percent. So may be there is not much to conclude from MSD's $100M move.

Read more about the Dell Inc. / Red Hat corporate alliance.

From the horse's mouth

2005-05-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Two days ago (5/10/05) I wrote a piece on IBM's acquisition of Gluecode, an open-source play that they are planning to use to open low end markets before converting Gluecode/Geronimo users to IBM's enterprise application server WebSphere.

One of the questions I was hoping to get answers for was: did IBM feel too much heat in the SMB market from JBoss and decided to gobble up a start up to hurt JBoss by making Geronimo better and more popular?

I guess I was too optimistic thinking that I had so many readers that all my questions were going to be answered and that's the end of it. Sadly, this morning my question was still unanswered so I decided to look around for possible hints. Who better than Marc Fleury (who loves to talk about JBoss's success and enjoys commenting on his competitors' every move) to answer my JBoss related question? Let's get it from the horse's big mouth!

Marc had already used his blog to share his initial reaction to IBM's acquisition of Gluecode. In addition to that, I found an audio interview of JBoss's CEO by ZDNet's David Berlind; it is available in MP3 format if you are interested. If you don't have 35 minutes to listen to the interview and another 5 minutes to read his blog entry (I've already done that for you), here's Marc's take on this move and its implications on the application server market:

Marc believes IBM is most likely NOT serious about this deal. Their lead WebSphere engineer did not know it was coming and said it was not going to affect his development plans for WebSphere. Marc's interpretation of this acquisition is that it's nothing more than a PR coup to create FUD and slow JBoss down while taking BEA out of the picture. All this with very little risk on IBM's part because, in his words: "Gluecode was a joke ... a dying/crappy company..." and it didn't cost IBM much anyway.

Fleury thinks that IBM's strategy doesn't make much sense, it is a "bait and switch" ploy where IBM wants to be OSS friendly until you are locked in and then they'll persuade you to upgrade to an expensive WebSphere/DB2 set up. He thinks this won't work simply because JBoss exists and JBoss has become good enough for the high end market rising up from its initial low end turf. His question is: why would people (customers and ISVs) pay for WebSphere if JBoss is FREE. My quick comment is to never underestimate what giants like IBM can pull off. I agree that BEA couldn't do it and that's why JBoss is squeezing them from the bottom up but IBM is a different beast. He also rightfully points out that Geronimo is not even on their competition radar today, they [Gluecode/Geronimo] still have to produce a 1.0 and a healthy community. Personally, I believe that, if (it's a big IF) IBM is serious about supporting Apache's Geronimo, it'll be on everyone's radar within 2 years. Look at what Eclipse (despite a late start) did to Sun's NetBeans.

Fleury also mentioned that, if anything, IBM's move confirms their fear of JBoss; it also validates that OSS is here to stay, it works and it's safe.

David Berlind asked Fleury a crispy question: why would IBM buy an insignificant OSS player [Gluecode] when they could have bought you and reached 67% market share? [The 67% figure comes from a BZ Research study that had JBoss at 34% and IBM at 33% followed by BEA at 27%]. Fleury's response was that he was not even approached because IBM is probably not serious about a genuine open source strategy; in addition to that "IBM doesn’t like us". This argument is definitely not convincing to me, people love you when you can double their market share. Other possible acquirers are obviously CA or BEA which could use a #1 spot (~ 60%) and become respected vendor and a force to be reckoned with, as it used to be.

Marc concluded that they were not interested in any acquisition at this point (I don't buy that, I think that it's only a matter of how much) and that he was going to have fun watching this movie unfold and enjoy being under the spotlight as a result (or side effect) of this "IBM PR coup".

Where do you think JBoss will be in 3 to 5 years? Dominant as an independent infrastructure player? Dead crushed by IBM's might? Or acquired by a much bigger vendor like HP, CA, Oracle or Novell? I am personally going for the latter. How about you?

Another interesting question: Is IBM going to force Sun into opening (in a FOSS meaning) Java, something they have been pressuring Sun to do forever?

With Geronimo's crew becoming IBMers and some of them are leading the Harmony project (the newly announced open source J2SE project), is IBM positioning itself to gain significant control on the Java platform despite Sun's resistance? You tell me.

Apple ditches key open source ally

2005-05-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of years after Apple selected the KHTML rendering engine as the foundation of its Safari web browser, Apple decided to build its own version called WebCore. WebCore is an LGPL open source project.

The group behind KHTML described their relationship with Apple as a "bitter failure". They were expecting much more contribution from Apple. According to KHTML developers, Apple engineers took a less "pure" approach to fixing bugs, applying patches that were not good enough to include back into the KHTML code base.

"In fixing one problem, they were breaking a whole bunch of other things. Apple developers were focused on fixing bugs in such a way that we could not merge them back into KHTML. Those fixes were never an option for us." said Zack Rusin from the KDE, "In fixing one problem, they [Apple] were breaking a whole bunch of other things. Apple developers were focused on fixing bugs in such a way that we could not merge them back into KHTML. Those fixes were never an option for us."

"As long as they needed us, they used us, but when they gained enough knowledge they had no reason to keep sending us reviews and patches," Rusin said. "At a certain point they decided it was a waste of time for them, and at that point the communication just stopped...We had hopes that they would pour resources into KHTML. But that never happened."

Apple is not abandoning OSS completely; the company's Mac operating system is based on the Darwin open-source project (BSD-licensed).

For more on this story, read this article by CNET's Paul Festa.

My question (for those who know the answer) is: why is Apple developing a browser at all? Why not pour all their Safari resources on making the already popular Firefox fantastic on Mac OS?

IBM continues to strengthen its OSS-friendly image

2005-05-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

This morning IBM announced the acquisition of Gluecode Software an open source application infrastructure company based in El Segundo, CA. Gluecode was founded in 2003 and received $5 million in March of 2004.

With this move, IBM solidifies its position as the leading supporter of open source software. IBM is a solid contributor to Linux with hundreds of developers on staff working on the open source operating system; it also backed the Apache Web server project and recently donated its very popular IDE framework Eclipse to the open source community.

It's interesting to note that Gluecode sells support services for Apache's application server Geronimo which is at the heart of the Gluecode stack. IBM's answer to the concern over the overlap between Geronimo and WebSphere is that Gluecode and Geronimo are not competition; they are door openers to enter new markets (companies or departments with less than 1000 employees) for which WebSphere is too big, too sophisticated and costly. "This widens our market," said Steven Mills, IBM's SVP for software. "Some customers may later move up to WebSphere if they choose to go in that direction." Chet Kapoor who joined Gluecode from BEA where he was the executive in charge of Quicksilver said: "We're very complementary to the strategy that WebSphere has now. They sell software at the high end, and we have a support and subscription business model for small and medium-sized businesses and departmental projects in big companies." Kapoor's career as a CEO will have lasted a couple of days as the news was announced on May 6, 2005.

A couple of random thoughts that I would like to get your opinion on:

- BEA continues to loose key people and struggles to find adjacent markets where they can grow, and my personal opinion is that they will go belly up unless somebody picks them up (Oracle maybe?)

- Did IBM (or the WebSphere group) feel too much heat in the SMB market from JBoss and decided to gobble up a start up to hurt JBoss by making Geronimo better and more popular?

- How important was Chet Kapoor in IBM's decision to acquire Gluecode? Chet knows so much about BEA and BEA's products (still today WebSphere's main competitor).

- This is great news for start-ups like Spikesource which is pretty much in the same business (now validated by IBM's acquisition) as Gluecode: providing enterprise service and test suites for open source stacks. Who will pick up this young Kleiner backed start-up? BTW, who's going to acquire Orbeon?

Please share your thoughts.

[Update:] Gartner published a research on this acquistion called Offense Is the Best Defense: IBM Leads Users to Open Source.

Open source Java - Hallelujah!

2005-05-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

My day started off with some good news: The Apache Software Foundation announced today that they are kicking off a project called Harmony that brings together a group of experts (including people from Kaffe and Classpath) to come up with an open-source version of the next Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) – aka Java 5 aka Tiger. My personal belief is that there is an obvious need for such an initiative for Java's own good. The Java community and some of Sun's key partners (on the Java front) such as IBM have been pressuring Sun to open source Java.

In Harmony's FAQ, Geir Magnusson (in charge of Geronimo ) explains that they could only start this project now because Sun changed the licensing rules in the JCP to better accommodate open-source software.

Sun, traditionally a very strong ally of ASF, seems a bit confused after this announcement. It's VP and fellow Graham Hamilton expressed some doubts about the need for Harmony in his blog : "Personally, I am not entirely sure if the world really needs a second J2SE implementation…" He adds: "Personally, I am very curious about how the Harmony project will work out - creating a full scale implementation of J2SE is a mammoth task, as the Sun J2SE team knows only too well.” In other words he is wishing good luck to the Harmony group, their task will be overwhelming and he is probably right. Anne Thomas Manes, from the Burton Group seems to agree with him as well, she thinks it will take a long time to build a clean-room J2SE implementation, "because it's a very big piece of code."

Another challenge facing the Harmony folks is to make sure they are extremely careful about IP issues. Apache's Geir Magnusson concludes his FAQ with: "Historically, there has been wide exposure to VM and class-library-specific source code that is the property of Sun Microsystems as well as others... We wish to make every effort to ensure that the licenses and rights of external projects and efforts are properly respected. To that end, we will explore additional ways to work with the Apache Incubator to ensure that all IP is carefully monitored and tracked as it enters the project."

If you would like to know more about Harmony, Geir will be speaking at JavaOne 2005.

A basic architectural diagram of Harmony is available at: http://people.apache.org/~geirm/harmony.jpg

Firefox has 50M fans and counting

2005-05-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, exactly on 4/29/05 at 9am PST, Firefox hit the 50 million download mark taking it to just over the 10% market share. This was one of the goals the Firefox team set for itself for 2005 back in October of 2004, when they were getting ready to ship Firefox 1.0. My congratulations to the Firefox team!

Check out this page where the SpreadFirefox team are displaying a real time count of Firefox downloads. It's pretty amazing how fast this thing is spreading! I'm glad to see the success of Firefox; I was getting really tired of IE (and the lack of choice). No competition, no innovation!

This week, the ad-supported browser Opera announced their new version 8 had been grabbed 2 million times in the two weeks since its release. Opera's success sent their CEO on a long swim across the Atlantic.

On a more serious note, even if Internet Explorer is still used by approximately 80% of the internet surfers, our friends up in Redmond better figure out a way to compete before they loose the browser battle which I believe is critical.

Thoughts on the advertising business

2005-05-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

My blog (more often than not focused on Open Source) is certainly not the best place to learn about advertising. This said, I read an article on Internet Week that provides some interesting numbers and trends and I thought I would share my $.02 hoping to get your reactions as well.

Marketers obviously try to reach consumers where they are. Today, according to Forrester who surveyed 99 of the nation's largest marketers, modern consumers spend about 1/3 of their time online, either at home or at work, which is roughly about the same amount of time they spend watching television. It is much easier to monitor and measure the impact of an email or an online campaign simply because you can easily get stats about consumers behavior (number of clicks, time spent on each page…).

In 2005 the online advertising and marketing business has reached $15B a whopping 23% increase over last year expected to reach $26B by 2010). That’s huge!

I gotta tell you I am not excited about the direct consequences of that on my personal “web life”. All of us will most likely get more spam; the content we read will be cluttered with ads. For now I am able to get around most of the ad junk by using good spam tools or very nice features that come with Firefox such as the wonderful AdBlock filter which is the second most popular Firefox extension. It looks like the majority of the surveyed marketers, feeling that TV advertising is becoming less effective, are going after blogs, RSS feeds and our mobile phones. Even though I don’t like it, I have to agree especially when people utilize TV like I do. I usually Tivo everything I am interested in and watch it later just so I can skip all the commercials. I can’t tell you how much I love Tivo! It makes me feel more efficient with my time I can watch a ton of content (news, documentaries, or games) in a very limited time. As a consequence marketers are now thinking about a static image that would be displayed as a poster on your TV while you’re skipping the commercial. They are also more creative using techniques like product placement in popular TV shows and blockbuster movies. We all remember the Minis racing in the Bourne Identity and I can’t count the number of times I saw Apple laptops in recent movies…

The article concludes that newspapers will have to either embrace the trend and buy popular online sites (like the recent About.com acquisition by The New York Times Co.), or come up with content that online sites cannot provide such as local news and information on community events and activities. I don’t really buy the latter, there isn’t a thing a newspaper can do that a website cannot do. It’s just a different distribution channel it has nothing to do with content. Furthermore, Yahoo and Google have made their intentions very clear that the local market is of great interest to them. Beyond the news, they now have Google Local and Yahoo Local to find businesses and they integrate that nicely with maps and price comparison (like Froogle), etc.

What do you think? How can newspapers and traditional media players survive without the vital support from marketers?

IDC confirms the expansion of OSS in EU

2005-04-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

There were two thought-provoking findings in a recent IDC report based on a survey conducted on 625 western European companies. The first one is that open source software is eating into the market share of proprietary software products and gaining ground in mid-to-large sized companies in Europe. The second one is that these companies perceive software to be very important for their ability to succeed and compete.

If you combine the two findings you conclude that open source is becoming mature enough for these companies to trust it and use it to build software that is a key component of their success. The study talks specifically about database open source.

Some European countries are even are moving to legislate preferences for open source over proprietary software. The proposals range in strength from mild boosts to complete mandates. France has issued a government order which says that “we should implement open source whenever possible”. Four years ago French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin established an Agency for Technologies of Information and Communication in Administration (ATICA now called ADAE), which seeks, among other things to encourage the use of free software and open standards. Three years ago, German Interior Minister Otto Schilly announced that his department has signed a major contract with IBM to install Linux and other open source programs across a broad portion of his ministry's IT infrastructure. Last year Munich decided to switch to Linux, similar stories with Bergen in Norway and the city of Paris. The list goes on and on…

Note that most of these stories are limited to infrastructure software (operating system and database).

Orbeon Submits XPL1.0 to W3C

2005-04-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that Orbeon and W3C are making progress on XPL. Read this post on published by OASIS XML Cover Pages.

W3C has acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission for the draft XML Pipeline Language (XPL) Version 1.0 specification from Orbeon, Inc. The XPL XML Pipeline Language defines an XML vocabulary for describing a processing model for XML components. XML pipelining is an approach to processing XML where the inputs and outputs of multiple processing steps (e.g., XSLT transformations) are connected together using a pipeline metaphor. Orbeon has implemented an XML pipeline engine in Java that executes a declarative XML pipelining language called XPL.

Orbeon offers an XPL engine (that implements the XPL specification) with its open source XML Platform PresentationServer.

The advantage of writing XPL-based pipelines using declarative XML instead of writing procedural code is that you end up with flexible code and you increase significantly your productivity for tasks that require high volume or complex XML processing. XPL features advanced capabilities such as document aggregation, conditionals ("if" conditions), loops, schema validation, caching, and sub-pipelines.

Open Source Software: What's Next?

2005-04-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

This is a big question; I am going to take a stab at it. It’s no secret that open source has conquered the lower layers of the stack namely the operating system layer with Linux, the App/Web server layer with Apache and JBoss, and of course the DB tier with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Some proprietary vendors have embraced open source to their advantage and sometimes used it to hurt their competitors (like IBM’s commitment to Linux to hurt Microsoft or SAP’s support for MySQL to annoy Oracle) while other vendors have a very hard time finding a new source of revenue such as BEA.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that open source’s next crusade will take place. The first obvious area is enterprise applications and some people believe strongly that the second one is IT management. Open source software usually thrives where systems take forever to implement and require big upfront software licensing fees charged by large proprietary vendors making it inaccessible to SMBs. I believe that CRM, ERP and PBX are definitely in this category. In that order there are strong open source projects that are trying to claim market shares namely SugarCRM, Compiere and Asterisk. I could have added the popular Nagios project for the IT management space which extended and supported by companies like GroundWork. Obviously, today these companies are no match for Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft or Cisco but they are gaining ground every day and their popularity is a clear indication of where OSS is going next.

I also believe that the penetration of open source in the enterprise application world might be even faster than its penetration in the underlying layers simply because there is a big market opportunity for services and the open source community will be much more enthusiastic about developing enterprise applications to solve real world (sales automation, HR, billing, supply chain, health records…) problems for themselves and their clients than developing operating systems which can be boring at times.

An interesting debate would be: How can large proprietary vendors continue to make money and grow? My modest and personal answer is that, among other things, they have to invest heavily in R&D to always stay ahead of the curve and change their licensing model. IT buyers are much more educated, they are willing to spend money as long as there is a demonstrable and durable ROI. Salesforce.com is a good example; they offer more functionality than SugarCRM and they don’t charge licensing fees upfront. It’s an affordable monthly fee that customers pay as they go. By the time Siebel realized they had to offer a subscription-based offering, Salesforce.com was already public. It was too late.

This is a topic I would really love to get your opinion on, please post your comments. Do you believe open source is going to be big in the applications space five years from now? How do you see large proprietary vendors make a difference? Do they have to change their licensing model? Do they have to use their domain expertise to deliver services as their software revenues shrink?

Commercial open source: a magnet for venture money (part 2)

2005-04-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article this morning on CNET that complements a story I posted earlier this month. Here are some highlights to take away from it:

It confirms that open source is driving the creation of start-ups that are attractive to VCs and the space is getting hotter by the day.
It warns readers that it’s not all that rosy, we’ve seen in the past open-source companies go belly up and burn huge amounts of money. In 1999 and 2000, according to VentureOne, venture capitalists invested $714 million in 71 open-source companies. Most of those projects collapsed. A big difference between then and now is the increased adoption of open-source software by corporate users. In addition to that successful companies like Red Hat (with $125 million in revenue in 2004 and a market capitalization around $2 billion) bring some credibility and peace of mind needed to help the adoption of open source stacks in Fortune 2000 organizations.
Marc Fleury (CEO of JBoss) is a bit worried that so many companies are getting funded without necessarily having a serious business; he said "I cringe a little bit when I see some of the companies that are getting funding. I worry it will give us all a bad reputation in a 1999, 2000 way."
One of those companies is SugarCRM which offers a model like Salesforce.com with a free open source CRM system as well as a professional version for $249 a year per user. SugarCRM convinced 100 customers to sign up for the professional version. It would be interesting to see where they are in 3 years and if they threaten the Oracle and Siebel of the world (at least for small and medium businesses).

I have one observation related to Fleury’s comment. I am not sure what he meant by that. I personally see most open source based businesses no different from commercial vendors. There are good ones and there are bad ones. So many commercial software start-ups die everyday without necessarily affecting Oracle or IBM’s reputation? What do you think?

Linux and its SCM controversy

2005-04-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to follow up on a previous story I had posted about Linux a couple of weeks ago. In it, I mentioned that Linux stopped using its traditional Software Configuration Management (SCM) system BitKeeper from the South San Francisco based BitMover. A dispute between with BitMover has forced Linux creator Linus Torvalds to embark on a new software project of his own, in addition to the Linux kernel. The new SCM project, called "Git" (GPL just like Linux) was started right after Torvalds abandoned the proprietary BitKeeper software he had been using to manage Linux kernel development since 2002.

The most notorious and extreme free software activist, Richard Stallman, had long called for Linux developers to kick out BitKeeper, arguing that using it helps to persuade kernel developers that the use of "non-free" software was acceptable.

Torvalds has already put his kernel development on hold for a week to work on Git. His decision to drop BitKeeper is also controversial. It will certainly affect the productivity of the kernel developers at least in the short term. Torvalds admits Git is still very rough on the edges and not ready for prime time. He said that the real cost will be measured by how much the new software would slow down the numerous maintainers that contribute to the kernel.

When asked why he called the new software, Git (which means rotten person in British slang), Linus replies "I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now Git."

Do you think open source should be developed using open source tools exclusively? Please share your thoughts.

What's with documentation in the OSS world?

2005-04-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

I found this post on TSS the other day that talks about JavaServer Faces and the release of a new version of the MyFaces project. More than the announcement itself I noticed in the thread below it a classic symptom of weakness that open source projects suffer from.

For the record I would like to congratulate the MyFaces guys for working hard and providing an implementation of JSR-127 that was elevated to a top level Apache project earlier this year. I remember our first JSR-127 expert group meeting at Sun exactly 4 years ago. JavaServer Faces took forever to materialize and will take a while to become a mainstream web development framework. There are very few worthwhile real-world websites using JSF today but I am sure this will change rapidly with encouraging contributions like Apache’s MyFaces project.

Back to the point I was trying to make in this post. If you read this thread you’ll notice that most of the discussion was not about the cool features provided by MyFaces or the enhancements they came up with since the previous version. It was about lack of documentation! I strongly believe this is a huge impediment to the expansion of open source. Not only documentation but important things like examples, tutorials, online demos, etc. All these things are extremely important and software vendors continue to provide them with every new release. So why can’t the open source community compete in this area? The answer is simple: I don’t know any developer who likes testing, writing documentation, or building examples as much as he or she likes developing cool new features or fixing tricky bugs. And the fact is, the open source community is still largely dominated by developers.

At Orbeon we frequently hear (from our community) that our documentation is far more superior than that offered by similar projects like (Apache Cocoon). The reason is that PresentationServer was a commercial product for a couple of years before we decided to open source it. Our documentation, tutorials and examples are commercial-quality and our users definitely see this as a differentiator.

The conclusion is that open source needs to get some inspiration from the commercial world. It doesn’t matter if an open source project offers great features and fewer bugs if what I am looking for is buried and nowhere to be found. People are just not going to reverse engineer the code to find and use your features. Companies like Orbeon or JBoss offer good documentation with their own products and others like Spikesource provide assistance for LAMP or LAMJ stacks. There is definitely room for what some call Professional Open Source.

What's in it for Adobe?

2005-04-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

After Oracle and Symantec, Adobe went shopping this week to become another software powerhouse. I know that this is no news to most of you by now but I tried to sleep on it and think about the reasons behind this deal and answer a few simple questions.

What does the deal look like?
Adobe agreed to pay $3.4B in an all-stock transaction, in other words, Adobe agreed to exchange 0.69 shares of its stock for each share of Macromedia. That would result in Macromedia stockholders owning about 18 percent of the combined company when the deal closes. As usual, Adobe's (the acquirer) shares dropped on the news by about 10% while Macromedia's went up by about the same. The deal was labeled as a long-rumored acquisition; I have to confess that I didn't see it coming.

The actual transaction is not done yet, it is contingent upon the approval of regulators as well as the shareholders of both companies, is expected to be completed by the fall. The newco's name will be Adobe and will be headquartered in San Jose, CA.

Adobe is based in San Jose and employs around 3,700 staff globally and has yearly sales of about $1.6 billion while Macromedia is based in San Francisco, employs about 1,200 workers and reported (in 2004) a revenue of $370M.

A small PR website was created to share some details about the two companies getting together.

Who's the new boss?
Bruce Chizen will remain as CEO of the combined company and Adobe's Shantanu Narayen will continue as president and COO. Macromedia's chief executive, Stephen Elop, will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations. And Rob Burgess, Macromedia's chairman and former CEO, will take a seat on Adobe's board.

What is Adobe after?
Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems couldn't be more pessimistic about this deal. On his blog Tim doesn't think this alliance makes sense. I tried to think about it and come up with possible reasons why Adobe would spend so much change acquiring Macromedia for around 42 times earnings estimates for this year.

The first thing that comes to mind is overlap. Overlap in products (Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand in graphics design, Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver for Web page creation, and Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks for working with photos), as well as opposing strategies as Adobe was a big supporter of SVG (competes with Macromedia Flash), etc.

Then I started reading about some numbers, especially market shares. According to IDC, Adobe generates about 92% of its revenue from the authoring software market and is fourth in the Web site design market with just under 5%. Macromedia generates about 80% of its revenue from Web site design (2% of Adobe’s revenue) and development tools. Now, the two entities look a little more complementary to me. The new group is clearly going after Microsoft who owns 80% of the authoring software market.

Macromedia's Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch described the opportunity on his blog: "Many creative professionals and web developers already use our products together, and we will be able to provide an even more efficient authoring and development environment to create, manage and deliver information."

Adobe saw in Macromedia an opportunity to go after new markets as well particularly in the area of providing content to mobile phones and other handheld devices (another area Adobe will be competing with Microsoft and their portable operating system). Macromedia has had success earlier this year in persuading makers of cell phones and other non-PC devices (such as Nokia and Samsung) to embed its Flash technology in their devices. If you believe the serial entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Marc Cuban the PC era is gone, the market needs to be looking at portable and exciting devices. Adobe wants to be a player in this market.

To end this post on a good note, Adobe is expecting strong earnings and sales in the quarter ending June 3 "toward the high end" of its targeted range, citing strong sales for Acrobat. Adobe is so bullish about its future they did something I always like to see companies do, the Board of Directors has approved a post-acquisition stock repurchase program of $1 billion.

Do you believe Adobe will be competing with Microsoft? Do you believe they will be successful in the mobile market with Flash? Do you believe Adobe is much better off with Macromedia than without it? Please share your thoughts about this acquisition.

"Unbending the Truth" vs. "Get the Facts"

2005-04-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

Unbending the Truth is hosted by Novell and claims it’ll teach you all the facts Microsoft doesn’t want you to know while the Get the Facts is a portal built by Microsoft as an attempt to sell you the idea that Windows outperforms Linux in addition to the fact that it’s cheaper. For the record, most of the case studies and research studies (often funded by the vendors themselves) can be misleading and have to be read completely and warily. Otherwise things can easily be taken out of context.

It all started when I read this executive email sent last year by Steve Ballmer to customers in which he compares Windows favorably with Linux. First he tries to explain why Linux is more costly than Windows. I am the last one to think that open source is free. But come on! I don’t care how you slice it and dice it; Windows is not cheaper than Linux. Some of the Microsoft studies found on the “Get the Facts” website are from 2002 and show that W2K’s TCO is lower than Linux mainly because the highest cost is staffing and finding W2K trained resources. They claim it is much easier to find than Linux admins. This has changed since 2002, Linux is much more popular now and well-trained resources are more affordable. Additionally, many IT organizations already have UNIX trained developers and sys-admins, which makes their transition to Linux smooth and almost cost free.

Following the TCO nonsense, Ballmer talked about security. I just don’t want to go there. If you Google the number of Windows-related horror security stories and do the same with Linux, you’ll quickly realize which is safe and which is Swiss cheese. Before his uninteresting closing argument, Ballmer talks about how he is increasingly hearing from customers that they are worried about indemnification. He goes on to say that no vendor stands behind Linux with full indemnification… Without looking too far, it looks like Novell is definitely providing some sort of indemnification.

My question to Ballmer is, if Linux is not safe, if it is slower and more expensive than other operating systems (including Windows), why is it the fastest growing platform in the world used by very demanding and prestigious organizations such as Toyota, Travelocity, U.S. Postal Service, Google, Linksys, amazon.com and many IT organizations in the public sector?

I think that the anti-Linux campaign Microsoft has been running just goes to show that they rightfully feel Linux is a big and viable threat. It may even help Linux’s unstoppable growth.

I am interested by what some of you think about this FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) game. Both vendors use incomplete arguments in these portals to display what they call facts that the other side did not want to share with you. In my company, we use Linux for our servers because it’s cheaper (in our case free) and safer; however we all have Windows XP development machines. As you can see the world is not black or white, both operating systems can co-exist in “harmony”.

The metamorphosis of the software industry

2005-04-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

One of the obvious changes after the crazy dotcom bubble-burst is that IT buyers are much more educated and demanding. They are done signing mega contracts. Instead, they would like to pay as they realize the value of what they are buying and as they see a clear return on investment. This has created a significant move away from monolithic multimillion-dollar software contracts and increased the popularity of pay-as-you-use licensing. Some fast movers like Salesforce.com have capitalized on these new business models with great success cannibalizing the business of giants like Siebel.

The consequence of these aggressive business models and the rising success of open source is that traditional software vendors (such as SAP and Oracle) started applying steep discounts to their software licenses to get new business. During the antitrust trial in 2004, an Oracle executive admitted that they were prepared to cut prices by 70%. The way I read this personally is that those giants realized that the real money is in the recurrent revenue produced by maintenance after the customer is locked in. CIOs often report publicly as much as 70 to 80 percent of their IT budgets are consumed by maintenance. During an earnings call in 2004, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted the company's maintenance (which includes fees derived from product updates and support) as an "extremely high-margin business." An article published by CNET shows how maintenance revenue manifestly exceeds (and keeps growing) license revenue for large software vendors.

By now I think I have made the point that the dynamics of the software business have changed and that maintenance, once a boring and unexciting, is where the money is coming from. What does this mean for open source? I think it’s very exciting news!

This simply means that many companies that provide high quality services around open source projects or bundles could potentially become billion dollar companies. Recently, we’ve seen several of those companies getting serious venture money. I was getting bored with Linux (Novell and Red Hat) being isolated open source successes. Seeing VCs inject money into those companies is very encouraging for open-source supporters who put their careers on the line to get their companies to adopt open source platforms. What businesses want is one neck to choke, one vendor to go to for its support needs so that they can focus on what they do best instead of wasting resources maintaining code they never wrote.

Do you think that one of the effects of open source is that software will never be sold the same way again? How many multi billion open source service providers will we see in the next decade? Do you think Orbeon, Optaros, SourceLabs or Spikesource have a shot at being as successful as Red Hat?

Useless alarm clock

2005-04-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t resist talking about this “gadget” even if it has nothing to do with open source. Brown University students invented an alarm clock that monitors your brain activity and only wakes you up when the body is ready to get up (the optimum moment during light sleep). At first, I thought it was cool as I tend to wake up in a cranky mood sometimes but then I thought to myself, this is one of those completely useless devices!

Next time I have an important customer meeting at 9am, I will set up my smart alarm clock at 7:30am. The alarm will go off at 9:30am because my lazy body wasn’t feeling like getting up at 7:30am. I don’t think the customer will be very happy to learn that I just didn’t feel like waking up early enough for our meeting. On the other hand, if you have nothing to get up for, why do you need an alarm clock?

Then I thought this is one of those useless geeky gadgets that will stay in a university lab. Absolutely not! This article affirms that a company by the name of Axon Sleep Research raised money and is planning to market this clock for $200. Good luck!

What do you think? Despite the smart science behind this thing, do you think there is big enough market for this gadget?

Open source in the public sector, who’s lagging?

2005-04-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

I came across this article published in early 2005, it talks about European governments and their position vis-à-vis open source. The study conducted on 371 local authorities across 13 European countries shows some interesting results. France was the leader with 71% local authorities using open source followed by Germany with 68% and Holland with 55%. In the UK the number was much lower, only 32%.

Since the article was published, things have changed in the UK. A new government funded initiative called the Open Source Academy was created to proactively push open source. The Academy brings together a consortium of 10 founding partners who, with support from industry, will launch a program aimed at tackling each of the major obstacles to open source adoption. It aims to provide a vehicle that will actively join up public sector work on OSS with European-wide initiatives during the year of the UK's EU Presidency.

The public sector in the UK is still lagging behind other European countries/cities (such as Munich, Paris or Norway) in terms of open-source adoption, but the open source academy aims at changing that.

In another article published by CNET, Stephen Shankland seems to indicate that the U.S. public sector is moving even slower even if open source is used by the Department of Defense, the U.S. Census Bureau and a few regional governments (like the city of Austin), the significant presence of Microsoft and the desire to boost U.S. companies is an impediment to open source adoption. According to Shankland, lobbying and advocacy group such as the Initiative for Software Choice (with members like Microsoft, Intel, and EDS) strongly oppose cases in which governments mandate use of or preference for open-source software which is what EU governments are actively doing.

How do you think open source is doing in the U.S. public sector? What do you think about the Initiative for Software Choice?

Open source experience is a big plus

2005-04-14T01:19:00.000-07:00

I read this article about IBM trying to recruit Firefox experts to build new features complimentary to their On Demand middleware stack. IBM is not the first big corporation to approach Firefox gurus. Google hired a few months ago Darin Fisher and Ben Goodger, the lead engineers for Firefox and recently added Brian Ryner. Beyond Google and IBM’s interest in hiring open source experts, I am starting to see a strong trend that makes experienced open source developers more and more desirable in the marketplace. It also works the other way around: Big companies who openly support open source projects use that “cool” image to their advantage to attract talented open source developers.

What do you think? Did you ever get a job thanks to your open source experience? Is your company interested to hire open source developers?

Google and Yahoo side-by-side

2005-04-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

Not nearly as cool as the application I was really impressed with a couple of days ago, but this one can certainly be useful in some cases. When I run a search on Google, sometimes I wonder what results Yahoo returns for that same search. So I open up another tab on Firefox and run the same search on Yahoo. Than I switch back and forth to compare the results. I often do that to see how we're doing, I run searches on things like PresentationServer. I don't have to do this anymore. A guy from Norway by the name of Asgeir Nilsen solved this problem for me.

Say Hi to YagooHoo!gle. Definitely not a name that sticks in the mind (I would have picked a shorter name like GooHoo!). However, it was useful enough for me to bookmark it.

Do you like it? Are you going to use it occasionally?

Silicon Valley startup to piggyback on the success of Firefox

2005-04-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

Former head of Marketing at the Mozilla Foundation Bart Decrem co-founded a company to support Firefox and offer assistance (money, technical assistance and hosting services) to add-on developers. Since its release, the open source browser Firefox has been downloaded 44 million times. "We believe that you can actually build a business on 44 million users," Decrem said.

Round Two’s short term vision seems to be the release of security and anti-virus software that is scheduled to ship in a few weeks. Longer term; Round Two plans to deliver services (such as blogging, social networking and email) as well as software that would turn Firefox into a web portal and compete with Yahoo, MSN and Google.

What do you think? Is Firefox doing fine without Round Two’s help? Do they have a shot at making money?

Open source licenses: is 58 enough?

2005-04-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

With all the controversy around open source licensing I felt it was time to express my opinion.

Many people complain about what they call license proliferation. I went to the licenses section of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) website and found no less than 58 different licenses. My next reflex was to go the same section of the very popular sourceforge.net to find out if all these licenses were used. And numbers speak for themselves. The most popular license is the GNU General Public License (GPL) with 43051 projects and the runner up was of course the GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL) with 6965 projects. The other popular licenses including MIT, BSD, MPL and Apache (combined) are used by roughly 7000 projects. Other than these six licenses the others are used by a ridiculously low amount of projects. This begs the question; do we need all 58 of them? Is it reasonable for OSI to continue to approve additional licenses? Does it serve the open source community or is it a source of confusion?

Danese Cooper, who has been on the OSI board since 2001, says that OSI's goal was to get large corporations to participate and they have. Unfortunately they all wanted their own vanity license. In all fairness, she admits that they tried to use the Mozilla Public License but they had to re-author the license because the MPL has hard-coded references to Mozilla. The result is license proliferation and confusion...

On March 29 of 2005, I was happy to see that Intel (one of those large corporations) announced the withdrawal of their Intel Open Source License from OSI. "Intel has been studying internally the issue of license proliferation. One step Intel would like to take to reduce license proliferation is to have the "Intel Open Source License" removed from future use as an approved OSI open source license" Said Intel's attorney McCoy Smith.

At the same time I remembered that Sun (another large corp.) had submitted a new license to OSI in December of 2004 which was approved on 1/14/05. Great! We got rid of a license and another one was approved. My first reaction was that Sun’s move was stupid. So I did some homework and read Sun’s CTO Greg Papadopoulos’ post as well as the diffs between MPL and CDDL (available on Sun’s website) and began changing my mind. My understanding now is that Sun is trying to come up with a template that other vendors and project leaders can use instead of writing their own license. I will believe that when I see thousands of projects (other than OpenSolaris) on sourceforge adopting the CDDL license. I am willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt on this one especially when big names like CA buy the template license idea.

Computer Associates is talking to Sun and IBM about creating a common commercial open source license for future projects. "We are actively looking at [Sun's] CDDL," said Sam Greenblatt, SVP with CA and in charge of open source at OSBC.

The final version will be a template license, Greenblatt said. The license should be finished by the end of the year.

Personally, I am waiting to see what IBM thinks of all this, they are the open source gorilla and the largest player of the commercial open source market. Today their position is all but clear: they are defending the GPL in court against SCO and they also have two other OSI approved open source licenses, the Common Public License and IBM Public License. Therefore, they may lean toward GPL, the CDDL template or something completely home made but I truly believe they will weigh heavily on this debate.

At Linuxworld 2005, several industry executives including CA's CEO John Swainson called for a clean up of the open source license system.

I am curious to hear where you stand on the open source licensing question. Do you see license proliferation as a problem, or does it serve a purpose? Have you experienced any frustrations either writing or complying with open-source software licenses? Do you think like me that IBM is in control in this debate?

1 + 1 = 11

2005-04-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Even though the focus of this blog is open source I couldn't resist sharing this application with you. This is what happens when you combine Google Maps with Craigslist.
A gentleman by the name of Paul Rademacher demonstrates the power of this combination. Cooler than cool!

Try it out!

What's OSH anyway?

2005-04-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

We all know open source software (OSS), does OSH ring a bell? You probably guessed it. It stands for Open Source Hardware. Does it make any sense to you? Well, IBM seems to think it makes sense, check out this article, it's not a joke!

IBM's venture capital partner Juan-Antonio Carballo declared: "The open-source model is quickly extending from software to hardware, and it will provide a similar swell of collaborative innovation."

I am interested to hear what you have to say about this one; do not hesitate to post a comment.

Is Linux homeless?

2005-04-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

In Q1 of 2002 Linus Torvalds decided to use BitKeeper to manage the complicated and global development of Linux. Torvalds declared "BitKeeper has made me more than twice as productive, and its fundamentally distributed nature allows me to work the way I prefer to work - with many different groups working independently, yet allowing for easy merging between them."

Three years later Linus decided (read his recent posting) to move away from BitKeeper and temporarily revert to a less automated system based on email. Some significant disruptions in the Linux development community are expected. Linus took a lot of heat from the open source community due to the proprietary nature of BitKeeper. Among those who criticized Linus was Richard Stallman the founder of the GNU Project. In his posting Torvalds made it clear that he was not a big fan of centralized source code repositories like CVS or Subversion, "Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on Monotone", said Torvalds. He is clearly leaning towards Monotone as a successor but no final decision has been made yet.

The natural question becomes, why is Linus creating distraction for Linux developers when everything was working well? Last week BitMover (maker of BitKeeper) announced they would discontinue the free product used by the Linux community citing that they were concerned some people were reproducing the capabilities of BitKeeper to make them available for free. BitMover's decision left the Linux community with a free solution that is not powerful enough to support their needs. More on this story soon stay tuned!

IBM: Open up or else...

2005-04-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference today, IBM's VP of technology and strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger confirmed IBM's strong support for open source.
"A big part of your power is to have your people work with the communities and donate some of your intellectual property to those communities so they can get better. Then you build proprietary offerings on top of the open-source platform," said Wladawsky-Berger. The best example is IBM's commitment to promote Linux for years. IBM assigned hundreds of programmers to improve it. Also, IBM donated the very popular Eclipse development platform to the community. At the same time, IBM sells loads of proprietary software, including its WebSphere and DB2. Obviously IBM is not in this for charity, the push for Linux is not for the love of the community but to hurt their Redmond-based competitor. To show their commitment to OSS, IBM is willing to go even further, they announced earlier this year that were going to donate 500 software patents to the OSS community. To keep things in perspective, IBM owns 10,000 software patents in the United States.

Perhaps the strongest statement made by IBM's Wladawsky-Berger at OSBC was that vendors who fail to adapt to open source won't be around five years from now.

I think that IBM has been the most aggressive of the big companies supporting OSS and turning it into an asset and a competitive weapon against competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle or Sun. Most of those competitors have been very quiet about their open source strategy and are still perceived in the open source industry as late comers at best.

Commercial open source: a magnet for venture money

2005-04-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago Venture Capitalist would not even consider meeting entrepreneurs with business plans based on open source. Waste of their valuable time, right? It was all about your "secret sauce", a.k.a. your intellectual property. No IP, no funding.

Well, evidently, times have changed!

According to Matt Asay, VCs have invested more than $150M in open source startups since March 2004. I can easily believe this number. Off the top of my head I can mention a few recent deals that make that number seem plausible:

$10M for JBoss (first round) led Matrix Partners with the participation of Accel Partners, $8.5M for Groundwork (second round) led by Mayfield, $7M for Optaros led by Charles River Ventures, $5.75M for SugarCRM (second round) led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), $4M for OpenLogic led by Appian Ventures and Red Rock Ventures, and $3.5M for SourceLabs led by Ignition. There are other rising names in the space including SpikeSource funded by Kleiner Perkins with stars involved like Kim Polese and Ray Lane.

That's some serious change!

The challenge until recently has been monetizing open source. The reality is that open source has truly crossed the chasm; new business models based on open source services have emerged and changed the software business for good. Today, open source startups are clearly attracting the best names in the venture community. Furthermore, I heard that most of the deals listed above were dog fights where some VCs had to be very flexible and generous to get in.
The takeaway is that commercial open source clearly represents a disruptive shift in the software industry.

OSBC 2005

2005-04-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

As an entrepreneur running a company that helps IT organizations solve business problems by providing services and solutions based on open source software, I wanted to check out OSBC 2005 and listen to a couple or speakers I usually enjoy listening to (like Geoffrey Moore). But looking at the registration page of this event, I realized I had to pony up $1495 (but you get ONE lunch). Call me cheap or crazy but I think it's pretty steep, especially for busy people who can only attend a couple of sessions. I guess IDG has no reason to lower the registration fee if they have enough people attending. I will just wait and listen to the sessions I am interested in on ITConversations. That's how I virtually attended OSBC 2004. One positive thought comes out of all this: If OSBC can charge that kind of registration fee and attract prestigious sponsors for a short event, it goes to confirm that Open Source is no free beer and that it is a becoming a real business.

If you have any thoughts about this, do not hesitate to share them with me (post a comment).

Is it too little too late?

2005-04-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

I read several articles recently about Sun's efforts to promote OpenSolaris and build a credible rival to Linux. Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz often claims on his Blog (and elsewhere) Sun's position as the #1 contributor in open source: "Sun is by far the single largest contributor to the open source marketplace, having recently dwarfed even UC Berkeley's contributions". Sun has also added Roy Fielding, a founder of the successful open-source Apache Software Foundation, as the 5^th member of the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board.

In an open letter to IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano, Sun's COO touts Solaris 10 as the best Operating System out there offering incredible opportunities for IBM's business. It may be true but I cannot blame IBM for betting on Linux even after the news about OpenSolaris came out. Linux might not be the best OS out there (it's getting there fast), but there is a huge momentum behind it and a ton of IT organizations using it on cheap machines. You cannot reverse all this even when you're Sun by simply announcing that you are open sourcing "the most secure OS the world has ever seen".

I may be wrong but I think it's too little too late and I even wonder if Sun’s move serves the Operating System open source community. It was doing just fine focusing its resources on the thriving Linux, sometimes more is less. Somebody must be happy up in Redmond.