Category: Red Hat
March 26th, 2008
Microsoft’s Chief Counsel Brad Smith urges open source rivals to compromise on IP issues, co-exist peacefully
Microsoft General Counsel and IP chief Brad Smith got a round of applause at the Open Source Business Conference Monday for showing respect to the open source community — but he faced some tough questioning from those in the bazaar.
One attendee asked how Microsoft could collaborate with an industry that was described by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as communism and one that CEO Steve Ballmer called a cancer.
“Look, I’m not sure that’s a question that has a ready answer …. You don’t want people to live with those caricatures and stay in the caricatures,” Smith said. “I don’t think you’ve heard Bill, Steve or me talking in those terms as of late. “
“We’ve been trying to have a more constructive conversation,” he added. “It’s not like let’s all sing kumbaya. There are issues and we have differences but we’re trying to take steps.”
Smith noted that rivals Microsoft and Red Hat — the operating system leaders in the proprietary and open source worlds — are co Platinum sponsors of the OSBC 2008, contrasting it to the old days when Microsoft execs brought security guards for protection when they attended open source conferences. Microsoft wants peaceful coexistence, he said.
Referring to the famed open source treatise The Cathedral & The Bazaar, Smith likened Microsoft and other large proprietary companies to cathedrals that have “set up shop” around the bazaar.
“We believe in the importance of building bridges so different parts of the industry can work together,” Smith said, noting the company started to build bridges with Novell in November of 2006 and has executed pacts with many other open source companies including Xandros and Turbolinux.
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar. How does a a cathedral do deals with a Turkish bazaar and what we came to is there are a lot of cathedrals that set up shop around the bazaar and can do agreements with eachother.
“Is the bridge finished? No there’re a lot of room for more dialogue and but we do believe in this concept that the bridge can span diff development and business models is good for the industry.”
Microsoft will try harder to co-exist but it will remain a cathedral.
Another question, for example: Why was Microsoft now opening up some of its patented IP as part of its Open Specification Promise even as its legal counsel last summer identified hundreds of patents it was ready to defend in a court of law?
“We do want to make strides forward. We need to have a discussion about hard topics, patents and IP. It’s much harder than copyrights,” Microsoft chief counsel said.
“We live on both sides of the patent fence. We have more patent lawsuits against us and we spent more money defending against patent lawsuits … we see firsthand the problems that exist in the patent system but we still believe in the benefits and value of well functioning patent system.”
Smith said the industry has evolved to a world where there are three business models that can survive. One is indirect monetization practices by the mainframe vendors in the past, who gave away the software to win big hardware deals. Microsoft’s Bill Gates then introduced direct monetization for software but the older model never went away, he said, noting that the software giant gives away software for free for its keyboard and hardware products.
And now, we’ve entered a new world where ad funded software is the new way of software monetization.
All can co-exist, he said. Microsoft has tried to move forward over the last two years but it will continue to monetize its IP, he said, noting that both sides –open source and proprietary companies—need to compromise and negotiate to find common ground.
And like cross licensing patent deals customary in the proprietary software world, Microsoft will hammer out agreements with open source companies — without giving away its software.
“We do what any business would do and look at it on a project by projects basis. We’re much better connected with the open source community. We love open source running on Windows. I can’t give you an answer that is a blank check … we’re making hard decisions on a ca by case business.”
Smith was asked by another OSBC attendee why Microsoft won’t support popular open source standards. His response? There’s plenty of room for competition.
“I’m not sure where to begin …. I do believe this isn’t a one size fits all question. There are different approaches that makes sense for different technologies, companies and times. It’s a big step. To take some technologies we’re proud of and offer it as a standard such as Open XML .. we took that step because it what we’re hearing from customers.”
Yet another attendee implied that Microsoft’s recent relaxation of its IP and specification licensing policies has no value to Bill Gates (his lunch money) or shareholders other than to prevent its distribution with open source software.
But Smith said he doesn’t buy into that notion or the logic behind it. Co-existence cannot happen unless all parties benefit in some way, he noted.
“It’s a fair question. We do believe it’s a system or model that makes it possible to clear the market at a low cost that cna be made to work for all of us. When prices are as low as they are, it shouldn’t discourage healthy evolution of market economics.”
Your contention “implies to me that make it expensive or free but don’t make it cheap. I don’t buy that either. I think we should price things according to their value and in a way that works for the industrand customers as a whole. Im not prepared to buy into that notion.”
Smith appeared on stage with several members of the open source community, including Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth, on left, who ribbed Brad Smith (second from right), about the such supposed difficulty of installing Vista SP1, which he said was like “installing airbags in a car.”
Smith retorted that he feels safer in Vista as a result.
March 25th, 2008
Red Hat CEO: We haven’t done a good enough job as an industry leader, or project leader
Only three months into the job, newly named Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst is ready to talk about what he sees as the Linux company’s big flaws.
No doubt, Red Hat is the leading open source company but ”I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job” of leading the industry, the former Delta Airlines COO said.
‘If you look at Red hat, we cast a pretty wide shadow … we are in virtually all Fortune 500 companies in the US and represent 80 percent share of the paid Llnux business,” he said, noting that the Raleigh, NC company is great at customer service but does not act like the ‘defining technology company of the 21st centry’ that it is.
“We do a lousy job of getting enterprises involved in the community,” Whitehurst said, adding that they have begun some projects such as one aimed at getting more community involvement in building management tools around virtualization but there’s much more to do. “We have to do a better job of involving the community, even if we own the operating system 100 percent lock stock and barrel.”
Whitehurst also said Red Hat will continue making acquisitions but is ‘narrowing its aperture” on enterprise infrastructure companies that complement its core business.
making acquisitions but is ‘narrowing its aperture” on enterprise infrastructure companies that complement its core business.
March 21st, 2008
Red Hat takes the open source security challenge
One big hole for open source lies in security.
It’s not a real hole. It’s a meta-hole. But we still view it as a hole, so it’s a hole.
That hole opened up again in Australia this week, where a “loud minority” got personal when Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Bill Gibson expressed concerns about open source security.
The assumption which makes this a meta-hole is that if the security scheme is open source, the security scheme is vulnerable. Thus visible software is vulnerable software. Catch-22 there.
That’s what makes Red Hat’s latest announcement worth reading. They’ve made their certificate system open source.
This is code originally obtained from AOL, some of which was already open source because it was part of the Apache Web server or Red Hat Directory Server.
It’s a major move from new CEO Jim Whitehurst, who came to the company from (shudder) Delta Air Lines. You may recall he had to prove his bonafides before a Matt Asay inquisition. (Matt had Jim sit in a comfy chair.)
Jim’s lucky they didn’t have me conduct that interview. I would have asked what college he went to. (Rice University, our mutual alma mater, has a college system.) Then I would have poked him with the soft cushions.
This doesn’t mean the supposed contradiction between open source and security will disappear, any more than racism will fade because we acknowledge it.
But it’s a start.
Loading …March 12th, 2008
Gnome 2.2 now available, planned for Ubuntu 8.04, RHEL 6, SLES 11
The GNOME Foundation announced the release of version 2.22 on Wednesday, an update that offers enhanced multimedia support, new file system, and enhanced e-mail, internationalization and accessibility features. GNOME is used in many popular Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva and Debian.
The version 2.22 announced today will be incorporated into the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu Linux V. 8.04, code named “Hardy Heron,” Mandriva’s 2008.1 and in forthcoming distributions such as Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 6 as well as Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Destop 11. In the interim, the GNOME update will soon be in Fedora 9, Debian and in Novell’s OpenSUSE 11 due in early summer. It is also incorportated in an update of Foresight Linux released today.
Those distributors may also opt to use the GNOME 2.24 update, which is due in six months, a GNOME spokesman said. GNOME also said it is hard at work on GNOME 2.24, due in six months. Planned features include a new version of its Ekiga VoIP client with a redesigned user interface and SIP presence support, an Empathy IM client that uses the Telepathy framework and a column and list view in the file manager.
According to a recent survey from desktoplinux.com in 2007, GNOME has 45 percent of desktop share, ahead of rival KDE with 35 percent.
GNOME 2.22 offer a variety of new features to enhance its use in multimedia applications. One is a new feature called Cheese that allows users to take photos and make videos using a computer’s webcam. Additionally, the MoviePlayer offers enhance support for DVD playback and new support for digital TV (DVB).
The update also offers a new virtual file system on GTK+ that replaces GNOME-VFS. The network transparent file system offers improvements such as the ability to recollect login credentials for a full session, enhanced reliability and use of the Freedesktop.org’s Desktop Trash Can to handle the storage of deleted files. The File Manager offers improved handlong of removable media.
The GNOME Foundation also emphasized that version 2.2 offers significant accessibility improvements, including enhanced screenreading and magnification and better mouse accessibility.
As part of its close collaboration with the Mozilla.org, GNOME 2.22’s Orca screen reading technology offers better support for Rich Internet Applications and Live regions. The update also features new support for Level 3 Braille, enhanced screen magnification for smother scrolling and support for colorblind filters.
That’s not all. Version 2.2 offers a host of those enhancements and new features including:
Drop shadowing on Windows and transparency effects
Evolution’s client support for the Google Calendar
Remote Desktop Viewer
Improved text editor printing
Download notifications in the Epiphany
Faster document viewer
Inhibited automatic suspend and hibernate when burning CDs
7-zip support in archive manager
Network multiplayer in chess
Deskbar opens Evolution contacts
PolicyKit integration for administrators
Anjuta IDE is now in the GNOME Developer Suite
Support for international clock and more than 46 languages
The release of GNOME 2.22 is dedicated to Raphael Higino, member of the GNOME translation team and GNOME Brazil who died in a motorcycle accident last year. He was 24 years old.
March 11th, 2008
CEO of dissolved Open Country buys management code, launches Linux, VM provisioning company
Open Country, once a rising star in the open source management software market, closed doors in 2007. But its former CEO, Laurent Gharda, isn’t giving up on its software.
Gharda acquired the intellectual property rights to Open Country’s core assets including its provisioning software and today launched a company called LinMin that focuses on affordable bare metal provisioning of Linux systems and virtual machines.
The CEO announced availability of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP), the fifth generation of Open Country’s provisioning software whose installation and operation — once complex — has been dramatically simplified. Installation takes only minutes and operation of the software is much simplified, he said. The product supports most versions of Linux and includes pre-release code that supports provisioning of Windows server products used in mixed Linux and Windows networks.
Open County tried to make it big selling management and monitoring software but the market was too crowded and commoditized, he said. By focusing on provisioning software, which is complementary to more full fledged management platforms, LinMin can take on high cost provisioning providers such as Red Hat Network for a fraction of the cost, and take on cobbled together open source solutions that are time consuming to build and costly to implement.
Gharda claims that a corporate provisioning solution costs anywhere from $10K to $200,000, while an annual subscription to his company’s LBMP costs $100 for 10 client systems, $400 for 100 client systems and $750 for 250 clients systems. Perpetual licenses are also available. To lower costs, LinMin has no direct sales force and is purchased directly from the Internet.
March 10th, 2008
Red Hat calls JBOSS problems solved and marketing related
Addressing a blogger’s snarky criticisms directly, the Red Hat vice president in charge of JBOSS’ middleware insisted the unit’s problems are now under control and were really all down to marketing anyway.
Craig Muzilla said a Red Hat reorganization over the last six months has given him responsibility for middleware profits, and he’s now applying market lessons to addressing perceived problems.
Muzilla was a senior vice president at MetaMatrix, which Red Hat acquired last year.
He admitted the marketing effort was troubled before he joined the company. ”In the process of integration there were certainly hiccups. Some people left. It was a healthy enough number that it made a difference.”
Still, “We’ve had growth every quarter this year,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot organizationally to move things forward.”
Specifically, “We added an overlay sales force who are specialists in middleware, hiring people from BEA and other middleware companies.”
Pre-sales, sales and support teams have been trained so ”those calling on large companies know who to call on, the basic value proposition of JBOSS, and that wasn’t the case in the first quarters after the acquisition.”
The development team, however, has stayed together, Muzilla insisted, helped by “compensation structures with participation in stock programs” and a commitment to giving them a sense that they have a platform for being heard.
As a result, the community has grown a lot, he said.
“At the time of the acquisition we had 10 million downloads. In the next 18 months we hit 20 million. That’s one quantitative indication.
“We haven’t seen any degradation in the community,” he added. “They’re not abandoning ship.” He said industry surveys show JBOSS holding 30-38% of the Java-based application server marketplace.
“My understanding is the alternatives have small market share. The others don’t even show up in single digits.”
Things like an annual JBOSS Innovator of the Year Award, announced at last month’s JBOSSWorld in Orlando (the first winner was Rivet Logic for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions) should keep the enthusiasm growing, he predicted.
“We’re coming up on 2 years since the acquisition. In the last four quarters we’ve done a lot and learned a lot. There was a lot of input from the executives at the JBOSS team.”
Rumors of the deal’s failure are greatly exaggerated. True? If you’re a customer, let us know what you think.
February 14th, 2008
Updated: Red Hat launches JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, 3 new open source projects
Red Hat announced a fully integrated SOA platform combining JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and launched three new open source projects.
Due by the end of February, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a subscription-based offering that incorporates the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB), JBoss BPM (jBPM) and JBoss Rules. The SOA Platform runs on Windows, Linux, Unix
JBoss ESB was previously an open source project and is now a supported platform.
The cetified SOA platform that integrates business applications and web services and provides enterprise application integration, ESB, and business automation needs,
Pierre Fricke, director of product line management at JBoss, said during a webcast today at JBoss World.
“It’s an integrated platform that brings together all constituencies and partners and applications together,” Fricke said, noting that Red Hat saw an opportunity to provide an integrated stack to save customers time and money. “We see a lot of custom ESBs deployed out there and they did it beause the first generation ESBs didn’t do the job.”
Red Hat also announced three new JBoss open source projects related to transaction monitors, SOA management and systems managemet,
Black Tie is designed to help customers migrate away from key legacy systems such as Tuxedo, Red Hat execs said. The legacy-to-java transaction processing integration system supports BEA’s Tuxedo APIs. It will start within 30 days.
The second open source project, JBoss SOA Governance, will give customers comprehensive management and control of their SOA environments. The project is really a series of sub-open source projects dealing with the registry, repository and policy management, and other as-yet-to-be-defined modules, executives said. One of the first projects, JBoss DNA.org, will focus on metadata integration.
The final open source project, dubbed RHQ, is a common systems management platform developed by Red Hat’s JBoss division and Hyperic, an open source management ISV.
A forthcoming Red Hat product based on RHQ, JBoss Operations Network 2.0, will be available in the spring of 2008, executives said.
February 7th, 2008
Citrix strays far from XenSource’s original open source mission
In 2005, hot new startup XenSource was positioning itself as the open source alternative to VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server.
Then came a controversial pact in 2006 between the powers that be at the Palo Alto virtualization software company and Microsoft. The mail goal, XenSource executives argued, was to ensure interoperability between the two platforms going forward and ensure that Linux virtual machines ran well on Microsoft’s forthcoming “Viridian” hypervsior, now known as Hyper-V.
If that wasn’t tough enough for open source fans to stomach, close Microsoft ally, proprietary software company, Citrix, bought XenSource, last October for $500 million, a whopping pricetag considering XenSource’s modest run rate. Prior to the deal, Citrix had no presence or role in the open source community and was one of the last ISV holdouts not willing to support Linux.
And now, a quarter after the deal was closed, Citrix officials have indicated that they will use the hot XenSource branding, but de-emphasize its identity as a virtualization company. Citrix’s flasgship Presentation Server has been renamed to XenApp Server, a fitting title considering its function as an application delivery platform.
But it has no XenSource code.
“Citrix is not a virtualization company,” said Phil Montgomery, Senior Director of Citrix’s Virtualization and Management Division. “We’re not trying to be another VMware. Citrix is an application delivery software company.”
In spite of that new positioning, XenSource is — or was — a virtualization company. But the competitive equation is now Microsoft + Citrix versus VMware, Montgomery told ZDNet last night.
Citrix’s Xen product lineup — XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer– does nothing else but virtualization, Montgomery acknowledges. Well before the XenSource acquisition, Citrix attempted to rebrand the company as a virtualization company ( I know because I sat in on briefings and saw the Powerpoint). Now, even with the XenSource deal, which gives Citrix the ammunition to become a full fledged virtualization company, Citrix has gone back to its previous marketecture as an application delivery platform with desktop and server delivery as new services.
While Citrix is using the Xen name for its individual products, it is positioning the entire stack — including its NetScaler web accleration platform — as the Citrix Delivery Center. From that, it appears that Citrix is diluting XenSource’s core identity as a virtualization company in order to score points with Microsoft and catapult Microsoft’s forthcoming HyperV hypervisor as VMware’s chief rival.
And the XenSource key products — XenDesktop, due in the second quarter, rather than the first quarter as planned — will ship roughly as planned, and based on Xen. XenServer 4.1, a forthcoming upgrade code-named “Miami” and due this quarter, has 50 new features and functionality — including open storage support, is planned to be released this quarter.
There are hurdles for Citrix to overcome. The newly named XenApp Server incorporates Citrix’s legacy Presentation Server and “Tarpon” application virtualization technology , which not only competes head to head against Microsoft’s Softricity software but uses no Xen code.
Citrix still has not said in detail how it will integrate the disparate products such as Citrix’s XenApp and Netscaler — with XenDesktop and XenServer, but opened the lid on a few new technologies and products designed to deliver and integrate virtual desktops, applications and servers.
For one, Citrix is going to ship a new product called the Citrix Workflow Studio, based on an acquisition of an unnamed Microsoft ISV that developed a graphical workflow tool based on the Windows Workflow Foundation. A technology preview is due in the second quarter. And the new XenServer Platiunum Edition, as it is named, incorporates desktop provisioning software Citrix acquired as part of its buy of Ardence.
The two tools will allow users to orchestrate, automate and provision virtual and physical desktops, applications and servers. But again, Citrix is not competing against VMware’s VirtualCenter. It’s funny, because I remember having discussions with XenSource two years ago and at that time it was all about Xen’s advanced services in Xenoptimizer, then XenEnterprise, taking on VMWare’s Virtualcenter.
Don’t get me wrong. Citrix said it intends to continue to support the Xen open source project and will support the Xen hypervisor even as it embraces Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Citrix spent good money on that acquisition and has every right to position the software in the way that it chooses. But open source backers will likely take another look at Xen and re-consider other open source firms embracing virtualization, including Red Hat and Novell’s use of Xen, Virtual Iron’s Xen platform, SWSoft’s Virtuozzo hypervisor and Qumranet – which is expected to launch a hosted virtual desktop product based on the KVM virtualization engine in Linux soon.
Time will tell if the M&A served to grow XenSource — or kill the open source star.
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February 4th, 2008
Torvalds criticizes patent trollers, Microsoft, Sun, virtualization craze
Linux creator Linus Torvalds blasted patent trollers, Microsoft, Sun and the virtualization craze in his second official communiqué to the public. And he said desktop Linux is going nowhere in market share.
In a second Q&A podcast posted on the Linux Foundation site, Torvalds told his interviewer, LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin, that the patent case against Red Hat and Novell is not surprising because of their stature in the industry. Yet he argues that patents have no value to the large companies they supposedly favor because it only makes them vulnerable to patent trollers –which are likened to rogue states in a cold war.
“Well, I think it does favor the corporate world in the sense that if you see patents as a cold war thing, it clearly helps to be big and have lots of patents because they’re the equivalent of having lots of nukes, and small companies and individuals can’t have nukes; it’s practically not very accessible,” Linus said, according to a transcript of the interview released Monday. “So, the model does favor large companies. On the other hand, again, that’s where the rogue state problem comes in. Large companies, in some ways, are more vulnerable to being blackmailed over patents, so when you have patent trolls, the trolls usually want to go after the big money, so they actually go after the large companies and now it doesn’t help to have lots of patents.”
The first podcast was posted In January. Linus Torvalds no longer conducts interviews with the general press. He speaks only with Linux Foundation, the organization that sponsors his work and that was founded in 2007 as a merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.
Patents have no real value, except as tools to inflict fear, he said in his second podcast posted this week, citing Microsoft and patent trollers as the chief beneficiaries of a broken patent system in the U.S.
“I think that Microsoft really sees patents as a marketing thing and I think that for two reasons: it is what they seem to have used in the past. So far I don’t think Microsoft has ever sued anybody over patents. They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don’t think they’ve – not that I’ve gone through any huge amount of law cases, but I don’t think they’ve generally used patents as a weapon,” Torvalds said. “But they’re perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace and patents is just one thing where they say, “Hey, isn’t this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.”
“Another reason why I don’t think Microsoft really seriously would go after patents is when you’re a convicted monopolist in the marketplace you really should not be suing your competitors over patents,” Linus also said. “I think that most Microsoft lawyers would say, “You know, let’s not do that; that sounds insane. ”
“They’re perfectly happy to use patents in the détente and cold war sense,” Torvalds said about Microsoft.
Torvalds also acknowledged recent efforts by Microsoft to improve interoperability with Linux and open source, but he maintains the number of people supportive of open source software at Microsoft is relatively small. “I think there are people inside Microsoft who really want to improve interoperability and I also think there are people inside Microsoft who would much rather just try to stab their competition in the back,” Torvalds said. “I think the latter class of people have usually been the one who won out in the end … so I wouldn’t exactly trust them.”
The creator of Linux was also somewhat suspicious of Sun Micrososystems’ new open source direction.
“It’s generally hard to build a community around a commercial entity that also wants to be in control because everybody else around that commercial entity will always feel like they’re at the mercy of Sun … And I’m not even going to go into Open Solaris because, quite frankly, I don’t even care. But I think you see some of that with a project that is considered to be completely open source and has been for a number of years, namely Open Office where the fact that Sun wants to have copyright assignments and exclusive control over the license ends up being something that actually drives away some developers,” Torvalds said.
He said Sun’s spotty track record with open source undermines trust in the community.
“In many ways, Sun has done a lot of things right. At the same time, they seem to often have trouble going the full last step. So, Java is an example of that where they have now … and they finally did that and it is now really open source, but at the same time it took them something like six years to get to that point and before that they tried to push a failed license where they did try to maintain control and they always claimed the best of intentions,” Torvalds added. “They claimed that they needed to be in control because they didn’t want to fragment the market and there was always this kind of rationalization for why they had to be in control.”
“When it comes to projects like Open Office where, again, there are rationalizations for why you have to assign copyrights to some and they may even be valid, but it does undermine the community because it means that there is a first among equals,” he said. “Sun ends up having rights that nobody else has. Even if they then act perfectly and they really behave well, just the fact that they have special rights makes people legitimately feel like they are second class citizens and that’s not how you build a community.”
In his discussion with Zemlin, Torvalds said he cares deeply about the Linux desktop but he is not optimistic that it will gain much market share in the next five years.
“Well, I don’t know about broader adoption, but the Linux desktop is why I got into Linux in the first place. I mean, I have never, ever cared about really anything but the Linux desktop.
The desktop is also the thing where people get really upset if something changes, so it’s really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows. And if you act differently from Windows, even if you act in some ways better, it doesn’t matter; better is worse if it’s different,” he acknowledged.
“I also think the desktop just fundamentally takes a long time to enter and it certainly takes longer than people, including me to some degree, have ever expected. There’s just this huge inertia in that market,” Torvalds said. “If you look at what the big picture is, things don’t really change that quickly. We don’t drive flying cars. And five years from now we still won’t be driving flying cars and I don’t think the desktop market or the OS market in general is going to move very much at all… But i don’t think the OS market will really change.”
Torvalds also said virtualization is “not that big of a deal” and he predicted that new ways of users interacting with operating systems will represent the key changes in the computing industry.
Virtualization has “been around for probably 50 years. I forget when IBM started offering virtualization on their big hardware. Maybe not 50 years, but it’s been all around for decades and it’s very interesting in niche markets - I think the people who expected to change things radically are just fooling themselves,” Torvalds said. “But also, I’d actually expect that new form factor is in new input and output devices. If we actually end up getting projection displays on cell phones, that might actually change how people start thinking of hardware and that, in turn, might change how we interact and how we use operating systems. But virtualization will not be it.
January 29th, 2008
Is the open source IPO a pipe dream?
Will Red Hat be the only major pure play open source company to go public?
That’s what observers are wondering as more and more open source stars are swallowed up by traditional proprietary giants, with Nokia’s purchase of Trolltech – announced yesterday - and Sun’s buy of MySQL earlier this month being the most recent. IBM, Oracle, Citrix and Novell have also made big open source acquisitions over the past five years.
“There will not be an open source company that goes public for the foreseeable future. Liquidity is too good and too hard to pass up. The players are too big with too much at stake. That’s a shame. I wanted to see an ecosystem of independent companies,” predicted JBoss founder Marc Fleury, after the mySQL deal was announced mid this month.
“This second generation of open source software companies while very successful has failed to produce public companies. There are countless software companies that are publicly traded but only one –Red Hat — is focused on OSS” said Fleury, who sold his JBoss company to Red Hat in 2006 for $350 million. Red Hat went public in September of 1999.
MySQL promised it would go public repeatedly last year but agreed in November to be acquired by Sun. The $1 billion deal, announced in mid January, was the first major open source acquisition of 2008.
MySQL vice president Zack Urlocker said the company was sincere about doing an IPO but needed the deep pockets and resources of a large company like Sun to take on IBM DB2 and Oracle. It would have taken the small company five to 10 years to scale up sufficiently to compete against those rivals, he said.
Zurlocker maintains that the M&A activity does not threaten the integrity of open source. Rather, it simply reflects how disruptive technologies alter the business models of incumbents even as it creates new opportunities for startups. Eventually, traditional proprietary companies will transform into fully open source companies, many predict.
“In a normal technology disruption, you end up a little bit of both: startups who are successful grow into big companies like Red Hat and some that reshape companies like Sun, and some large companies that don’t pay attention to it and they get disrupted,” Urlocker told ZDNet. “Many startups like Alfresco and SugarCRM were rooting for us on an IPO. But from their perspective, this [deal] still means open source is a legitimate technology that is now in larger companies.”
According to a recent 451 Group report on commercial adoption of open source, the number of open source acquisitions by established vendors increased to 30 in 2007, up from 22 in 2006 and 15 in 2005. Yahoo’s $350 million buy of Zimbra and Citrix’s $500 million purchase of XenSource led the pack last year, while Red Hat’s purchase of JBoss and Oracle’s acquisition of Sleepycat dominated in 2006. Novell’s purchase of SUSE Linux in 2003 fulfilled predictions that a large operating system company would buy a Linux distribution.
The 451 report predicts that more deals are coming and names MuleSource, SpringSource and Terracotta as likely targets. Others cite open source content management ISV Alfresco and open source CRM star SugarCRM as other potential targets.
“There are many VC-backed startups that drew in rounds in previous years and have since build significant customer lists; these startups are ready to be harvested,” said the report, which also pointed out that VC funding last year dropped 25 percent to $267 million.
There are other reasons open source ISVs are not doing IPOs. For one, their revenues aren’t typically on par with those of proprietary companies.
ISVs are also worried about product quality. Zurlocker said mySQL felt “trepidation” about the pressure Wall Street exerts on companies for quarterly results and the strain of hefty compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley, a burden for many startups.
Fleury summed up the M&A trend as the potential “death of the standalone OSS business model” but he was quick to add that a pure play multi-billion dollar OSS consultancy is not out of the question. Today, SpringSource announced the purchase of Covalent Technologies, an acquisition target cited by the 451 Group.
The M&A wave hasn’t deterred the IPO prospects for other ISVs such as Alfresco.
“We are at the very beginning of the open source revolution, not the end. It is far too soon to worry about the eclipse of the open source movement into the shadows of proprietary software companies,” said Matt Asay, vice president of business development at Alfresco. “ Surely proprietary vendors will continue to acquire open source companies, as they can see the writing on the wall … meanwhile, pure play open source companies like Alfresco will continue to build toward IPOs. Alfresco was founded by a team that has successfully taken several companies public. We see no reason why we and others can’t do this same thing again, but this time with open source software.”
Red Hat itself has made some acquisitions but at least one venture capitalist posed the company should have picked up more visible targets to grow its business – and ensure its survival
“Will Red Hat survive as a standalone tech company? Not sure. They may have left too many open doors for Sun, Oracle, Microsoft and even Citrix,” said the VC. “If you think about how Red Hat could have been the open source Microsoft or Oracle - having the OS, JBoss, MySQL, Xensource, Zimbra and a desktop and server application strategy that could push Microsoft and Oracle to think differently about their business. The issue with Red Hat is they breathe their own exhaust fumes and think they can engineer better than anyone else. Once you hit a certain level of critical mass within a company, you need to keep your antenna up and be on the lookout for competition that makes for good M&A targets. Instead, Red Hat believed it could out engineer the market. So far, that has proven to be a bad idea.”
After Novell bought SUSE, IBM bought Gluecode, and Oracle bought Sleepycat, I wondered if the strategy of traditional proprietary publicly traded companies was simply to remove their emerging competition and prevent little open source companies from growing into big ones — that might go public.
One MySQL customer expressed little concern about the M&A trend, noting that there’s no guarantee that pure play open source companies will protect their interests better than a traditional company. Novell’s Miguel de icaza told ZDNet that Sun has a good track record of working with FOSS companies.
“It would be my hope that Sun pursues a path with MySQL that keeps a very strong commitment to the free MySQL tree that lags a bit behind the enterprise version. Despite the grumblings sometimes in the free-version community that we’d love to get MySQL enterprise patches more quickly, the fact is that eventually [MySQL] did move back to the free version and we did get them and both the free and the enterprise customers had the same core set of features minus some management tools,” said Nat Brown, CTO of iLike.com, who is also a Sun customer. “This felt to most people to be equitable. I contrast this to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux path that Red Hat took where they carved off their free/community version (Fedora Core) and left it out in the cold for the community to build & maintain – very few people in OSS thought this was supportive of the many developers who had worked for free to make RHEL possible.”
The 451 report cited Ingres at the “head of the open source IPO queue” after the MySQL deal. But it’s not clear which direction that company will take.
“It makes us the only independent open source database company, which will no doubt open up new partnership opportunities for Ingres. The price tag Sun is paying for MySQL has many swivel-chair financial analysts trying to put a valuation on Ingres today,” acording to a company blog posted after the deal was announced. “Above all else, I believe that Sun’s acquisition of MySQL is a ringing endorsement of the open source model. ”
January 22nd, 2008
IBM adds Ubuntu, Red Hat support for Lotus Notes-Symphony OpenOffice Client
IBM announced at Lotusphere 2008 plans to offer its Open Collaboration Client — which consists of Lotus Notes and Domino 8, Lotus Expeditor and Lotus Symphony apps suite — with support for Ubuntu Linux and in a special marketing bundle with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
It’s the first time OpenOffice played prominently at Lotusphere (now in its 15th year) , and perhaps not the last.
In August, IBM joined OpenOffice.org and revealed plans to offer to customers for download at no charge a newly named app suite called Lotus Symphony, based on existing document, spreadsheet and presentation apps also known as IBM Productivity Tools.
Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org code, supports ODF, as well as Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite formats, and is currently available in beta 3 form. Beta 4 is expected to be available for download at the end of January, the company announced today.
The first Open Collaboration Client on Linux was delivered with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise in August.
IBM plans to offer full support for Ubuntu Linux with the delivery of Lotus Notes 8.5 in the second half of 2008. The Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is included with Lotus Notes 8 but is also available as a separate download.
The company also announced a marketing pact with Red Hat that calls for the two companies to deliver and support a combined solution consisting of Lotus Open Collaboration Client on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and Desktop 5 to small and medium-sized businesses.
OpenOffice folks are glad that IBM is finally standing behind the open source OpenOffice desktop. But many observers question whether IBM’s Lotus Division — which has tried several times unsuccessfully to play in the Office suite market — has a fighting chance with Microsoft Office still the dominant player and Google apps the rising star in the web 2.0 market.
“We’d prefer them to ship OpenOffice.org to their customers,” quipped OpenOffice marketing chief John McCreesh, in an e-mail last September after IBM’s Lotus Symphony was unveiled. “However, it’s good to have another first grade software product using ODF. Every additional product helps nail the lie that OASIS’s ODF is somehow tied to OpenOffice.org the same way that Microsoft’s OOXML is tied to Microsoft Office.”
January 16th, 2008
Oracle-BEA deal expands lock-in strategy, offers new risks and opportunities for Red Hat
Oracle’s $8.5 billion dollar buyout of BEA dramatically shifts the enterprise applications software market once again, as well as additional pressure and opportunities for Red Hat’s JBoss Division — and the whole open source apps community in general.
The deal, if approved, expands Oracle’s immense enterprise applications software kingdom, and should give CIOs pause before signing over their souls to Larry Ellison. Although Red Hat is still digesting its acquisition of open source middleware JBoss, as well as its appointment of a new CEO late last year, the company should move fast to capitalize on its powerful rival’s key weakness: its never ending quest to own the aps market and lock in customers.
For years, Red Hat and other open source backers have pointed to freedom and choice as the most valuable assets offered by open source. At the same time, proprietary database giant Oracle has worked feverishly to amass a virtual monopoly in the enterprise applications software market, extending its iron grip into the middleware and SOA space in an effort to lock in customers and stymie IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and the spread of open source itself.
Make no mistake: Oracle’’s acquisition binge has put an end to the “best of breed” apps era and while irritating its traditional rivals also increasingly pits its proprietary software stack directly against the emerging open source software stack.
Sure, Oracle launched its own brand of Linux but no doubt the gesture was a not-so-veiled slap at Red Hat for buying JBoss. Any CIO who hopes Oracle will offer its most lucrative apps — including WebLogic — under the GPL or anything like it are dreaming.
The time is right for Red Hat — and other open source apps vendors — to strike a blow at Oracle and turn up the volume on ithat vendor’s lock-in strategy. The open source community has been quite vocal against Microsoft for existing at all, and yet has given Oracle a free ride. Why? Because Oracle offers its software on Linux — Microsoft’s nemesis?
Who is the real enemy of open source?
Even Microsoft has attempted to soften its stance with customers, pledging to make it software at least interoperable with leading open source offerings. Through its acquisition binge, it seems as if Oracle is trying to crush any and all prospects for emerging open source applications as well as those of proprietary rivals. Red Hat and open source companies should turn up the volume on this stratey and target nervous customers who may be tiring of the Redwood City, Calif. company’s power play.
January 16th, 2008
Sun’s planned deal to acquire MySQL will strengthen its open source story
Sun announced Wednesday that it is buying MySQL for about $1 billion — $800 million in cash and $200 million in options. The news comes on the same day that mega proprietary database software giant Oracle announced its intent to buy middleware giant BEA.
The deal, which awaits regulatory approval, should allay any talk that the popular open source database company is not as commercially viable as company executives have claimed. Following the company’s announced intent last year to go public, some venture capitalists MySQL lacked the level of revenues and customer volume to warrant an IPO.
In spite of that, Sun is betting big that the deal — which is expected to close in the third quarter of fourth quarter of its fiscal year — will strengthen its growing arsenal of open source products — including OpenOffice, OpenSolaris and open Java, and position itself nicely in a $15 billion database market. Still, some are wondering how such a deal might impact how MySQL is licensed going forward.
Sun said MySQL will be integrated into Sun’s Software, Sales and Service organizations, and will gain distribution through all of Sun’s channels including its OEM deals with IBM and Dell. MySQL’s CEO, Marten Mickos, is expected to join Sun’s senior executive team.
MySQL — which represents the M in the open source “LAMP” [Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl] middleware stack — lists facebook, Google, and Nokia among its corporate customer base.
“Today’s acquisition reaffirms Sun’s position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world’s largest traditional enterprises,” said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems, in a prepared statement released the the press on Wednesday. “MySQL’s employees and culture, along with its near ubiquity across the Web, make it an ideal fit with Sun’s open approach to network innovation. And most importantly, this announcement boosts our investments into the communities at the heart of innovation on the Internet and of enterprises that rely on technology as a competitive weapon.”
Sun said it remains committed to offering MySQL on GNU/Linux, Windows and OpenSolaris and MySQL will be combined with Sun’s OpenSolaris , GlassFish, Java platform and NetBeans to expand web development capabilities for its customers.
Sun will announced details later on Wednesday, as will Oracle, which announced its major acquisition of BEA systems also today.
December 31st, 2007
For 2008 media will create Red Hat-Ubuntu war
Here’s an easy prediction to make. In 2008 the media will gin up a “war” between Red Hat and Ubuntu for “control” of Linux.
It’s already started. The latest distribution of Red Hat Fedora, Fedora 8, is called “an assault” on Ubuntu at MadPenguin.
If by assault you mean potentially better, worthy of comparison and interesting, then please sir may I have another assault?
The new Fedora 8 has improved support for notebooks, for gamers, and for programs like PulseAudio. These are good things, and it will be interesting to see how Ubuntu raises the bar in 2008.
But we are still talking about open source code here. Open source improvements are not proprietary, they benefit everyone. That’s the idea.
Another way in which the media will crank up the Red Hat-Ubuntu “war” theme involves the hiring of Jim Whitehurst as CEO, replacing Matthew Szulik. Whitehurst comes to Red Hat from Delta Airlines, and some see something wrong with that.
Here’s a clue for y’all. Running a business is not a religious exercise. Whitehurst is an experienced business executive, and that’s what Red Hat has decided it needs right now. Whitehurst’s job is to make the trains run on time.
Whitehurst is not going to be providing vision. That’s the job of folks like vice president for open source affairs Michael Tiemann, who also heads the OSI and seems quite happy with the appointment.
Yet I guarantee you’re going to see a host of articles over the next two weeks contrasting Mark Shuttleworth’s entrepreneurial flair with Whitehurst’s button-down mind.
The press needs to be reminded of some basic points here:
- Open source development is complementary.
- Management of a company is not the same as management of a project.
- Politics and business are different subjects.
On my way back to Atlanta yesterday our plane’s entertainment system failed. I watched Red Hat Enterprise Linux fail to load several times on my seat back. Yes, it was a Delta jet.
Does this mean Whitehurst will cause Red Hat to crash and burn? Of course not. There was probably a hardware fault, and the jet arrived home on-time. But I guarantee someone is going to read it as an omen.
What matters is whether Delta, and Red Hat’s other customers, remain satisfied with the support Red Hat delivers them, against how much support money Ubuntu can gather. That’s the business metric on which Whitehurst will be measured.
But the competition is a good thing. It means new features, new options, and new possibilities for all Linux users in 2008. The more successful businesses we have based on Linux, and the more money they make, the better for everyone.
Just don’t expect it to be covered that way.
December 11th, 2007
Projity exanding open source, Saas attack against Microsoft Project
Projity is turning up the heat on its SaaS and open source attack on Microsoft Project.
The San Mateo, Calif. company is launching next week the next major release of its commercial project management service, Project-ON-Demand.
Projity is also looking to expand its footprint in the open source space with support programs for its OpenProj desktop, deals with Linux distributors and possibly offering its server-side software as open source.
Marc O’Brien, chief executive of Projity, said the company is planning to offer commercial support programs for its open source project management desktop next year and is considering releasing some of its server-side code such as multi-projecting and reporting under an open source license.
“We’re rolling out support programs to augment that. It’s another monetization opportunity,” O’Brien said about his open source desktop, which is designed to work with leading open source office suites including OpenOffice, StarOffice and IBM Symphony. “We do see that request out there.”
The Projity exec also hinted that the company is close to a deal to bundle OpenProj with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and has also had discussions with Red Hat and Ubuntu. OpenProj is currently bundled with Mandriva, another Linux distribution that is popular in Europe and is being marketed in the U.S. ”
“We’ve got major visibility at the distros. We are speaking to Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu and we’re getting a warm reception because those companies are now orienting their desktops to the business community where ROI is important,” he said.
Projity claims that its open source project management desktop has been downloaded 175,000 times in its first three months on the market. It is released under the OSI-approved CPAL license.
The 6MB OpenProj download supports Linux, Macintosh and Windows and is free of charge. It comes with an open [Microsoft]Project filter.
Projity makes its money on its commercial software-as-a-service offering called Project-ON-Demand, which has client and server side components and is offered at $19.99 per month.
Even as the company steps ups its attack against Microsoft Project on that front, it is also considering offering its server-side components under an open source license. “We’re thrilled to open source our desktop and we’ll have to address [the server-side],” he said.
Projity is turning up the heat on its No. 1 rival, Microsoft, whose dominant Project project management application is ubiquitous in the marketplace due to lack of competition, O’Brien claims.
Next week, the company will launch a major revison of its Project-ON-Demand Saas offering that features a slick Ajax interface to improve usability and enhanced server-side reporting features. Projity also plans to offer team collaboration and time cards features.
O’Brien is optimistic about his chances, claiming that Microsoft has failed to offer an Office 2007 bundle with Project included and is offering the standard version at $599 and Pro version at a steeper price of $999.00.
“I don’t want to wake a giant but it may be hubris on Microsoft’s part. You can’t find an Office suite that includes Project and they’ve bumped the price. It’s a very high priced market now and the number of competitors has dwindled to almost none. ”
Given that, Projity expects to see more interest in its SaaS offering and its new open source offering. He claims Projity has several large deals pending in Europe, including one company that replaced 3500 copies of Microsoft Project with OpenProj. He also claims that Peugot is using OpenProj with SLED on its desktops.
“There was a big gap out there and and so we know this is another cog in the wheel that helps the entire industry,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the development of the open source marketplace. It’s no longer just a fringe element of develping economies for free software. We don’t run into objections about open source.”
“A day in a life without Microsoft is becoming real,” he added.
O’Brien is an industry veteran who in the 1990s co-founded an ASP called Web Project that hosted project management software. It was financially unfeasible but the effort was udnerwritten by Sun and Cisco. In 2000, the company was acquired by Novient. Key execs including O’Brien waited until their non compete expired and in 2000 created Projity after seeing this large software sector “completely abdicated” to Microsoft, O’Brien said.
December 3rd, 2007
When is half a loaf enough for open source?
The last month has seen several attempts to give open source advocates half of what they have been asking for:
- Apple will offer a software development kit for the iPhone but the design will remain proprietary.
- Verizon will let other phones on its network but will still control which ones.
- Sun has made Java open source but still controls its development.
(The picture is actually an Oak House Miniature available here for the equivalent of $8.)
In all these cases, and more (examples involving Red Hat come to mind) we see bows to the open source concept from vendors still demanding the control open source resists.
During a period of full developer employment, which we’re going through now, my guess is vendors can get away with this. Everyone has their time accounted for, employers can call the tune, and the rest are entrepreneurs.
The early years of this decade did not feature full developer employment. These were the salad days for open source, when we were all green in judgement. It’s possible we may soon enter another such period.
If jobs become harder to come by, will this half-a-loaf approach still hold, or will out-of-work developers wrest control through their own coding?
When open source projects talk about getting help from “the community,” in other words, they may mean different things at different points in the economic cycle.
When jobs are plentiful, the community becomes a collection of highly-organized and structured projects, each seeking a return on some financial investment. Money calls the shots.
When jobs are scarce, the community becomes a group of loosely-organized individuals, with a variety of motivations.
This is not to say everyone is a money-grubber in good times and altruistic in bad times. But employed developers are giving someone else control of their time, and (often) of their code. The company becomes the community, and the community becomes a set of corporate alliances.
Will these projects, and others, pay a penalty for their desire to maintain control when skilled developers find themselves with time on their hands, or is the current trend going to hold?
November 30th, 2007
Pure play open source Microsoft ISV details transformation from proprietary world
One Boston-area enterprise application software vendor detailed its transformation from a proprietary company into a purely open source ISV – at Microsoft’s local headquarters last night.
Aras Corp, of Andover, Mass, decided last January to begin offering its commercially established multi-platform product lifecycle management (PLM) and business process management (BPM) software using an open source model, on the Microsoft stack only. No Linux or Unix.
“Many companies have gone from [offering their software] on Linux and Unix to Windows but there was no pure play Microsoft open source company, and we looked,” said Marc Lind, vice president of marketing for Aras, who spoke at the Microsoft office in Waltham, Mass. Thursday night.
One caveat: Aras adopted the Microsoft Community License,not the GPL.
But why would any commercially successful ISV take this path, especially one that competes against big companies such as Oracle and SAP?
Faster innovation, for one. Aras, for instance, recently became one of only 10 ISVs to gain full certification for its software running on Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, a feat which would not have been possible without the open source development model, Lind claims. Those Microsoft products will ship in February.
In 2005, Aras saw two seemingly disparate market trends emerging and the possibility of carving out a differentiated business model from its competitors.
“At one point, we were supporting J2EE on Websphere and we were multi-platform. But we were seeing clear indicators that customers were beginning to make a pervasive corporate commitment to Microsoft in the backoffice for server apps,” he said.
At the same time, Aras was seeing increased customer interest – especially its military customers — in open source because of its licensing and deployment flexibility and better control over IT costs. “In open source, we saw undeniable momentum and increasing corporate appeal for open source as a format, he said.
Aras started tinkering with the idea in 2005 and spent more than a year formulating a strategy. The company adopted a Red Hat-like open source business model, in which the software is free but the customers pay a maintenance fee for updates, fixes, security patches and other value added software. Its software requires use of .NET Framework, Windows Server and SQL Server.
Aras’ strategy has been met with mixed reviews within Microsoft. On the plus side, and unlike other open source enterprise apps vendors like MySQL and SugarCRM that compete against Microsoft’s SQL Server and Microsoft CRM, Aras does not compete directly against Microsoft in the server apps market.
Still, Aras exec were worried how its paying customers – and Microsoft – would respond. “We thought about it. What would Microsoft do? Will it be ok? Will it be null and void and would we have to re-implement the entire stack on LAMP? These were real questions we were wrangling with.”
Fortunately,Aras came up with a solution for its existing customers who paid big bucks for the software: free maintenance for a specified period. And fortunately for them, the open source group within Microsoft, led by Bill Hilf, offered executive sponsorship, paving a way for them to prosper.
It didn’t hurt that Aras chose to use the Microsoft Community License, which imposes no contribution requirements on users.
He said the results have been excellent to date. He would not comment on profitability but said the projected revenues stream is panning out. Immediately after announcing the switch and re-launching the company lin January of 2007, Aras picked up several enterprise customers that had been in the pipeline but averse to capital costs and it also began picking up more steam in the midmarket.
“The subscription model has a beautiful cumulative effect; it is very predictable. Its very profitable and highly scalable. It just keeps growing and has very nice deferred revenues stream. You know you have numbers in bank before you start the quarter. The investors like this model. ”
He’s certain that most software vendors will eventually adopt an open source model but is not worried about the large public companies following suit since they live quarter to quarter and Wall Street would not be able to stomach a sudden switch, and is certain his other competition won’t be able make the transition smoothly because their companies are still too big. “It’s a painful transition,” he said about the groundwork and time investment necessary to switch.
The event was sponsored by the New England Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA).
November 26th, 2007
JBoss, Apache founders engage in war of words on the web
JBoss founder Marc Fleury lashed out Sunday at a blog written by an Apache chief claiming he did not pay proper homage to the Apache Software Foundation after making his fortune.
In Maison Fleury’s latest blog, entitled, “The Brotherhood is Displeased,” Fleury takes issue with a web post authored by Apache Software Foundation co-founder and director Jim Jagielski last week that chides the JBoss founder for whining about not getting a formal invitation to the recent ApacheCon conference and his lack of financial support to the ASF, whose code is embedded in JBoss software.
Red Hat purchased the open source enterprise Java middleware (based on Apache Tomcat) in mid 2006 for more than $350 million. Fleury, who became a multi-millionaire as a result of the transaction, served as senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s JBoss Division briefly and left in February of 2007 to pursue other interests.
“Jim thinks I oughta follow what the ASF does because I owe them for the success of JBoss. Jim asks me to consider a sponsorship of the ASF, now that I have got some moollah,” Fleury wrote on his blog Sunday. “Clearly, those that I feel I owe, I also feel I have already taken care of by way of the JBoss equity cap table, which included people who worked at JBoss, members of many OSS communities, as well as some members of the ASF. JBoss, and now RHT sponsor various Apache projects.”
The testy web exchange started on November 14 after Fleury wrote a blog questioning why he was not formally invited to the recent ApacheCon, held mid this month in Atlanta. Fleury noted that he crashed the conference and ran into some people with grudges against him.
In response, Apache guru Jagielski penned a piece arguing that Fleury would be more up to speed with community events if he paid any attention to the foundation and “invited” Fleury to become an ASF sponsor.
“So Marc, how about becoming an ASF sponsor? I figure that the Platinum Sponsor (at $100,000) is the right level. The donation would only be a bit over 0.06% of what you personally made off the JBoss deal, which is an amount I hope you could afford. If money is tight (and with the holiday season right around the corner, that’s perfectly understandable), then maybe the Gold level ($40,000) is the right fit, at just 0.026%. Please don’t hesitate to contact the ASF’s fundraising team if interested. Heck, you can even contact me directly if you like. In fact, I’ll even mail out a written invitation to sweeten the deal. ”
In his latest missive, Fleury also points out that his deal with Red Hat forbids him from giving money to a competitor.
“We paid for coders; not politicians, or should I call them Aparachiks. The idea of funding [those who drive] community spirit offends my sensibilities,” Fleury wrote. “Even if it didn’t, I would still decline the offer. My Red Hat contract prohibits me from contributing to projects that compete with JBoss. Do I need to remind Jim that Geronimo competes with JBoss, albeit not very successfully. Should I be grateful for Geronimo?”
It will be interesting to see if Fleury gets a formal invite to JBoss World, being held in Orlando from Feb. 13-15.
November 12th, 2007
Is success ruining open source?
Now that the open source movement is awash in cash, we should ask whether that cash is destroying it.
The charm of the cash-poor open source movement was you couldn’t be fired. Everyone was a volunteer. You could take this code and fork it.
But with corporate-run communities like Sun’s OpenJDK, even other corporations wonder if that’s the case any more. Someone drives the bus, and everyone else (even Red Hat) becomes a passenger.
Red Hat’s own brain drain also begs the question. Project leaders leave, taking their passion and code sense with them, yet the project moves on, led by whoever the boss has chosen. Isn’t that the way the proprietary world works?
Matt Asay today has great praise for soccer’s Cesc Fabregas, whom he imagines as a great coder. But Fabregas, the scheme he plays, and his Arsenal teammates are all creatures of Arsene Wenger (above), a great executive, and the business risk-takers who built a new stadium to increase their profits.
The point is that while open source can reform business practices, making them more transparent, and placing new pressures on management to provide for workers and customers, it does not replace the business model.
What appears to be a revolution from the inside is only corporate evolution in action.
November 8th, 2007
Red Hat, Novell race to offer better Windows guest support, Windows Server 2008 virtualization support
Even as rival Novell celebrates an expanded technical collaboration with Microsoft, Red Hat has released a 5.1 update designed to make its Linux a better platform for virtualizing Linux and Windows workloads.
The software, released Wednesday, for instance, offers live migration and save/restore support for fully virtualized Linux and Windows guests. It also offers para-virtualized device drivers to improve performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3,4 and 5 guests and enhanced performance hikes for Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 beta guests, the Raleigh, N.C. company announced.
The update also offers improved graphical management tools, support for the updated Xen 3.1.0 hypervisor and improved serviceability. RHEL 5, with its first built-in Xen virtualization hypervisor, shipped on March 14.
ISV partner GroundWork said the new live migration features and support for Windows guests makes Red hat Enterprise Linux a far more mature platform for virtualization. “This means you can migrate a live application from one hardware platform running the Xen environment to another hardware platform without having to stop the application. This gives tremendous flexibility to the customer to fully utilize their resources,” said GroundWork Open Source’s Senior Director of Product Management Bob McKee. “RHEL5.1 also adds additional support for some embedded features for the Intel Itanium2, and AMD Pacifica chipsets to give better virtualization performance for customers running on those chipsets.”
Not surprisingly, Novell announced on Thursday the one year anniversary of its interoperability accord with Microsoft and reiterated a commitment from both companies to make their current and future virtualization technologies interoperable.
Novell said, for example, the two companies are working in their joint interoperability lab in Cambridge, Mass. to ensure interop of Novell’s current Xen-based SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Windows Server virtualization and Windows Server 2008 with Xen.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 isn’t expected to ship until February.
With that, Microsoft plans to offer the first real beta of its “Viridian” virtualization hypervisor. The fully baked Viridian hypervisor — which is supposed to be compatible with Xen — is expected to ship six months after Windows server 2008. It’s unclear the extent to which this Xen compatibility will benefit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which also is based on Xen. Seems obvious Novell’s Linux will benefit more.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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