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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: mergers & acquisitions
November 20th, 2009
Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision
Florian Mueller, coordinating opposition to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems and mySQL, sent a note today cheering word that Oracle has asked for, and gotten, a six-day delay to answer European objections to the purchase. (Picture from Roberto Galoppini.)
Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, is working with mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.
“Oracle is now apparently backtracking from previous claims that the European Commission has no credible theory of harm. If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. This is another sign of enormous weakness only three weeks after Oracle withdrew its antitrust application in Russia.
One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments. One more week won’t transform a traditional company product like MySQL into a community project that could be developed by volunteers just because it’s open source. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party.”
Mueller said the delay in Oracle’s response means a decision on the merger won’t come from the European Commission until January 27.
Widenius strongly disagrees with mySQL co-founder Marten Mickos on the Oracle-Sun deal. Mickos as written to EC Competition Commissioner Nellie Kroes asking that the deal go through.
My personal view is that Oracle could spin control of the code base into a foundation like Eclipse, with control based on investment, which would also enable money to flow in from mySQL stakeholders like Amazon.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insists the delay in Europe’s approval is degrading the overall value of Sun, which also controls such important open source projects as Java and Open Office.
I do not disagree.
But due to its open source license Oracle is not gaining control of the mySQL code base, just becoming its commercial sponsor. So why not bring free money to support the code base and have something better to sell support on?
It’s reasonable that Ellison resents the interference of European bureaucrats in Oracle’s affairs. But personal feelings should not get in the way of business. This is business.
Business is just business.
November 19th, 2009
Terracotta buys Quartz
Open source Java clustering software developer Terracotta announced its intent to buy an open source job scheduler known as Quartz.
The integration of Quartz into Terracotta’s platform will ease high availability job scheduling and scaling applications to multiple nodes, the company said. Quartz is currently integrated into SpringSource and Red Hat products and counts Adobe, Cisco, Level 3 and Vodaphone as big customers. It eliminates the need for a central database to handle coordination, Terracotta reports.
Terracotta, of San Francisco, intends to support the Quartz open source project and will maintain the code under the Apache 2.0 license.
The job scheduling software will enhance Terracotta’s use in virtualized and cloud infrastructures, the company says.
“Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups,” according to a release issued by Terracotta on Thursday.
“Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments,” Terracotta announced.
November 16th, 2009
Montavista embedded Linux eaten by Cavium
Embedded Linux is proprietary by its nature.
Expressing software inside a chip, then selling the chip, gives embedded Linux a business model, but that business model is tied closely to the success of the chip being sold.
So as chip makers have turned to Linux to power their new designs they have bought the software houses that pushed embedded Linux. Intel bought Wind River and now Cavium has bought Montavista.
LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg is troubled by this, but not for the reason you think. Very few of these companies are left now, and those are very small. But Weinberg is concerned more that Montavista failed to bag the really big bucks it was seeking at its founding 10 years ago.
What embedded Linux means for users and software developers is that there are open source on-chip tools you can write to and use for building bigger applications. Who controls the embedded Linux company is less important than that it succeed.
Cavium is considered a “start-up” networking chip company, but it’s doing some cool and interesting stuff.
This month Cavium showed a networked high-definition WiFi design, dubbed netHD, that can move 1080 HD feeds around your home on an 802.11n set-up. It’s working with Hitachi on “security processors” and drives the latest Netgear firewall. Despite continuing losses stock buyers have bid the company up to $850 million.
One can argue that, while Montavista hoped to sell for more, its investors are now getting a taste of a fast-growing proposition. And their success, Cavium’s success, will be open source’s success as well.
NOTE: My apologies to those who like to engage in flame wars here, for delivering a story that contains nothing but good news. How about this….Microsoft! (Stallman?)
November 10th, 2009
Open source be not proud
Open source is, in part, a release of ego.
When a program is proprietary, it’s yours. You own it. You can feed it or you can kill it.
Not so with open source. When software is made open source it is with the knowledge that its fate is shared among all stakeholders. The contributions that make it valuable may well come from outside, the direction of the software is no longer completely in the hands of its owner or sponsor.
Larry Ellison doesn’t understand this, and I suspect neither does Wall Street. Otherwise, why would the Street be cheering on Ellison’s suggestion that he’ll kill Sun to keep Euro-hands off mySQL?
More than the future of mySQL is now on the line. So are the futures of Java and OpenOffice, and all the other projects Sun Microsystems sponsors. Ellison thinks this fact should make the EC Competition Commissioner, Nellie Kroess, back off. He seems to think the U.S. government can make Kroess relent.
The key to why Ellison is wrong can be found in the paragraph above. It’s one word. I’ll wait…
The word is sponsors.
Open source companies don’t own the code bases that are in their charge. They seek to monetize the code, so the code can be expanded, so it will draw more committers. Acquia doesn’t own Drupal, and Automattic doesn’t own Wordpress. The code bases are, in fact, owned by the community, simply by virtue of being open source.
Ellison seems to think that if he snaps his fingers and brings down the wrath of heaven, then mySQL and Java and OpenOffice will cease to exist. This would be true if they were closed source. In that case they would be orphaned, and if no buyer were found support would disappear.
Open source does not work that way.
Sure it would be tough for these big projects to find new sponsors. But there are plenty of prospects around.
Google would have an interest in Java, as might Microsoft. IBM already has a stake in Open Office. I’m certain we can find another home for mySQL, too. Even Glassfish might well find a new home within the federal government.
Ellison’s threat to kill Sun’s open source projects if he does not get his way is an empty one. Someone would pick up what remaining pieces have value.
Open source, divorced from its sponsor, turns to software water, and would quickly flow through Ellison’s hands.
Go to an open source conference. Listen carefully to the commercial open source businesspeople you see there. They may talk about their kids and their companies, their hobbies and their passions, including a passion for the projects they control.
But they know those projects are more like their kids than their sailboats. They are responsible for the software they control. They do not own it. It’s not “my” software. It’s “our” software.
This is the attitude you must take if you’re to make a success of an open source business. This is why many in the proprietary world, like Larry Ellison, confuse it with communism, or socialism, or some other foreign -ism.
Open source be not proud. Open source code responds to whomever gives it the love of time. The parents aren’t those who gave it the DNA of capital, but those who gave it the love of hard work.
November 4th, 2009
With Zapatec Funambol has one stack to rule mobile open source
Funambol, now billing itself as the leader in mobile sync, has bought Zapatec, which creates Web 2.0 solutions using AJAX.
The result, the company believes, will be a one-stop shop for building mobile applications that run as well as native apps across multiple platforms.
Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.
The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.
Steger said Funambol’s sync technology solves part of the first problem, Zapatec most of the second, and the combination will enable a total solution.
“A lot of people think the future of mobile apps will be like Web apps, like AJAX apps on desktop browsers,” said Steger. “If you can build a Web app that works on a lot of phones you can just build one version.”
Not exactly. “Mobile is different from desktops because two of the most important things you need to do are integrate with the core apps on the phone, like the address book and calendar, because other apps do.” This makes it harder to build a single app for multiple platforms and carriers.
Funambol solves part of the problem since its mobile sync is designed to be cross-platform and cross-carrier. Zapatec solves the coding problem.
You can call this innovation, but then it’s all based on an open source core. Developers will want to do business with Funambol, not just download its stuff, to get the full effect, Steger said, but the effect should be cool.
October 27th, 2009
Will OpenSolaris survive Oracle?
With Apple having followed through on its promise to dump the ZFS file system, and Oracle still preparing to take over Sun any time now, we should consider the future of the technology, and perhaps the OpenSolaris operating system it rides on.
OpenSolaris was Sun’s attempt to secure a future for what had been its proprietary Unix. It has some advantages over Linux, on which its advocates will gladly bend your ear over a couple of beers.
But there’s a curious thing about technical advantages in the age of open source. They don’t matter as much as they once did. After all, if open source can compete with proprietary products that have decades’ head start and armies of programmers behind them, how big is an open source program’s technical details?
Open source has taught some hard lessons.
It’s pretty clear that the programming of a few little features don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy software world. Oracle has its Unbreakable Linux program in which it has invested heavily. Does it really make sense for Oracle to keep carrying OpenSolaris, or is it time for Larry Ellison to tell it, “Here’s looking at you, kid” and just walk away?
Best movie ever? You decide at Amazon.com.
October 22nd, 2009
Did Stallman fisk himself?
Richard Stallman makes a good bogeyman for the proprietary software people because he’s not politically correct. He shoots from the lip, as they say, considering contradiction a hobgoblin for little minds.
But did he really fisk himself in arguing against the Oracle-Sun deal?
Ed Burnette certainly thinks so.
I am not so certain. Rather than bandy words, let’s talk about meaning.
The original deal between Sun and mySQL anticipated that mySQL would continue to progress as a direct GPL competitor to Oracle. (Has it really been over 20 years since Michael Douglas’ star turn as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? Apparently so.)
That’s important because the enterprise-class database systems available under open source, like PostgreSQL, are only available under licenses other than the GPL. Licenses Stallman does not endorse.
What’s clear from reading articles by the deal’s advocates, including our own Matt Asay, is that this is no longer in the cards under Oracle. “The reality is that mySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets,” he writes.
Fair enough. But let’s assume for a moment you have an idea that could turn into the next Twitter, the next Facebook. It’s a small idea, but these things grow fast if they’re good. Everyone rushes to the rail. You can get flooded with traffic.
So how do you scale? One common way is to switch from your mySQL database to a “big boy” database — Oracle. This is hugely expensive.
So you can either be constrained from the start or face the prospect of getting Oracle licenses before launch. Not an exciting prospect. Daunting enough that it could keep people from trying.
It’s called a barrier to entry and it exists in every business. Except the Web. Online you can still start from nothing, with nothing, and make something enormous in a very short time.
Stallman’s fear is those days end with the Oracle-Sun deal. He feels mySQL got suckered into getting bought with big promises, then Gordon Gecko swooped in and cut them off at the knees.
Is he wrong?
October 22nd, 2009
Metasploit finds another way to go commercial
The Metasploit Project has found a way to go commercial without turning its design team into suits, as it was acquired by Rapid7.
Details on the deal were not released, but Rapid7 did go through a $7 million venture financing round last year with Bain Capital.
Metasploit, which is a penetration testing project, will become part of Rapid7’s NexPose security suite.
In reaction to this deal the usual suspects made the usual noises, worried that Metasploit may go closed source or take its eye off the ball, but to founder HD Moore it’s all good.
He revealed in a blog post called Metasploit Rising that he’s been working on the project as a hobby for six years, but he will now have a full-time job as Chief Security Officer for Rapid7. The Metasploit developer who goes by the nom de keyboard Egypt will also go on salary at Rapid7. (Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.)
Projects get commercial arms all the time, with lead developers often becoming executives like Dries Buytaert at Drupal or Matt Mullenweg at WordPress. This is generally received with much rejoicing among community members. It means software will get regular updates and they can obtain professional help when their questions go beyond what the community can answer.
This deal seems like just another way of doing the same thing, only the founders get to stay at their keyboards, in development, without having to become salesmen or magazine cover boys. The concern is whether the commercial sponsor/owner has the same love of the code and the community that the founders did.
I can’t answer that for certain, but that’s the way toward profit. If a community has value, and that of Metasploit certainly does, then Rapid7 would be foolish to do anything but support it.
October 21st, 2009
mySQL starring as Peter Pan
The debate over mySQL comes down, in part, to a question of whether mySQL should be allowed to grow up.
Certainly this was the promise when Sun acquired mySQL, that it would grow to become a “big boy” database that could go toe-to-toe with Oracle and DB2. (Robin Williams played Peter Pan against Dustin Hoffman in 1991’s Hook, available at Amazon.com.)
Open source fans of the plan to acquire Sun (and mySQL) are either forgetting or ignoring this. I think Matt Asay tells it straight here:
The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
That is today’s reality, and it was yesterday’s reality too. If Oracle succeeds it will be tomorrow’s reality, most certainly.
But that’s not the only possibility. As two UK-based open source advocacy groups (and Richard Stallman) wrote yesterday:
If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development of the functionality and performance of the MySQL software platform, leading to profound harm to those who use MySQL software to power applications.
This seems to be a peculiarly European view. You will note that Stallman personally endorsed this letter, not the Free Software Foundation.
(Correction: One of the groups referenced above, KEI, is based in Geneva, Switzerland, but has a UK office.)
The American view is that there are both closed source and open source alternatives to mySQL, specifically PostgreSQL and Ingres. The European view is that open source must be allowed to grow up, and communities must be allowed to compete directly with the big boys, or competition is not real.
My view remains that, if Europeans feel challenged by this transaction, open source offers them the opportunity to fork mySQL, and to invest as heavily as they need to in order to grow the software into something better. Set a course for the second star to the right and straight on till morning.
Of course, given that this is open source, the chief beneficiary of a European-funded, truly competitive mySQL code base will be Oracle. (Larry Ellison as Tinker Bell?)
September 3rd, 2009
What the EU delay means for Oracle, Sun and us
The EU’s decision to delay the Oracle-Sun merger is an important marker in the history of technology and business.
As a practical matter its importance is limited. The merger will eventually be approved.
Once a merger agreement is announced the company to be acquired always starts losing its independence, as some managers start maneuvering for positions in the new company while others pursue exit strategies. Were Oracle to walk away now Sun would not be viable. Another merger partner would be needed.
The importance of the move lies more in the realm of policy. European regulators are stopping, at least for a time, an American transaction that American regulators have no trouble with.
Back in the era of big navies this was called “a shot across the bow.”
Oracle’s initial statement on the matter is cool, but I do not want to be the person serving Larry Ellison his coffee this morning. A bunch of foreigners are delaying implementation of his plans, lowering the chance of success for this merger, interfering with American business.
The EU has grounds, of course. There are thousands of Oracle and Sun employees in Europe. That is why the reaction from Redwood Shores, so far, is restrained.
But if the case drags on this could easily escalate, with American businesses demanding freedom from European interference and Europeans sniffing about monopoly power.
Eventually, those charges and those feelings are going to come out. Maybe not on this deal, but at some point some American company is going to lose patience and start raising a political stink.
What happens then is anyone’s guess. Do you have one?
September 2nd, 2009
Will new Skype owners deal differently with open source?
There is growing speculation, especially given its deal with Digium, that the new owners of Skype may take a different attitude toward open source.
That would be a good thing.
Skype has long been the most popular Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) client, but it is also closed. It was proprietary, not just in terms of its coding but in terms of eBay’s attitude toward doing business.
Its proprietary nature gave Skype the marketing budget it needed to win in the marketplace. But it also hampered VOIP efforts to go beyond voice.
While VOIP gained popularity as a telephony replacement its importance goes well beyond that. Once voice is integrated as a normal Internet service, it can be combined with other services in any number of ways.
The difference between a VOIP program and a Web conferencing system is not that large. You can not only mimic all the common voice services using VOIP, but add more as you need them or imagine them.
This has not happened up to now, partly because much of our voice traffic has moved to cellular networks which digitize it as a matter of course and monitor their networks to gain the most revenue they can out of every bit. For cellular, VOIP is just a way of squeezing more calls into limited bandwidth.
So the question becomes, what can Skype offer, alongside the open source movement, that will make it part of a compelling suite of services rather than just a way to get around telco gatekeepers? How, if Skype is to become part of the open source movement, will we get the word out to the mass market?
Vonage has shown a way to reach the mass market with a service based on open source, but investors are turning away from it due to coming competition from Skype and Google. So can Google deliver an open source VOIP service worth advertising, and what might it add to one?
What is the future of VOIP, and what part will open source play in it?
August 12th, 2009
Will all the good open source companies be acquired?
Another one bites the dust.
Add SpringSource to the expanding list of independent open source companies that have been gobbled up by proprietary software giants.
Let’s consider the growing list: IBM’s purchase of Gluecode, Novell’s purchase of SUSE, Citrix’s XenSource deal, Nokia’s Trolltech buy, Sun’s purchase of MySQL, Oracle’s purchase of Sun (and hence MySQL and OpenOffice) and now VMware’s planned $420 million acquisition of SpringSource.
Is this what the founding open source developers envisioned?
Doubt it, but fewer open source backers are opposed to such mergers as the use of open source software expands in the corporate sector and mixed hybrid software stacks are growing up in the data center.
Open source is not toppling the ranks of proprietary software giants (yet) but the quiet revolution is taking place: the model of free and open software development has reduced vendor lock-in and is delivering enormous benefits to developers and customers, observers maintain. The acquisiton trend simply reflects this notion: industry titans can’t beat it so they’re joining open source, observers also maintain.
“I expect VMware will continue to invest and grow the platform and that bodes well for open source. I hope they realize that part of the value is the large number of people building on the platform for free,” said Larry Augustin, president and CEO of SugarCRM, a large open source CRM vendor. “VMware doesn’t have a long history in open source but this is a big bold step for them and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
“They did some contributions to the kernel and and made a free version of the hypervisor available but not in open source. This is their first big open source step and shows the value of these open source companies and platforms. ”
Some open source players question Oracle’s acquisiton of Sun but think the VMware-SpringSource marriage is a healthy one.
Open source is “a great production and distribution model, the latter being more important, that creates some truly enterprise-class products that customers need. For software developers this is especially true, since they want unfettered access to products to try them and understand how they work without needing to engage in a lot of commercial activity, which they find to be a distasteful time sink,” said Jeff Hartley, VP of Products and Marketing (correction) of Terracotta, which develops open source clustering software for Java and partners with both VMware and SpringSource.
“With our software, you can look at the code if you really want to know how it works, and you can suggest improvements or become a committer and help make future products. This point about distribution is perhaps just one reason why VMware and SpringSource make sense together, with Spring as an open source provider,” Hartley said. “As VMware builds its portfolio of products to make enterprise software easier to build and manage, it needs to connect up the stack with developers. SpringSource has certainly done a good job of that and is a big help in high regard in the developer community and have fantastic adoption.”
Once upon a time, corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Sun and VMware were considered the greedy proprietary vendors that open source startups would one day replace. Yes?
But that’s not panning out. Open source has gained credibility but the industry has yet to spawn another billion-dollar baby. So what shifted?
A realization that the open source business model may not be working as well as the open source development model? Or another aspect of open source’s bottom up success?
OpenBravo’s CTO recently said such deals are inevitable as proprietary giants infuse needed revenue into aspiring open source companies whose download count vastly exceeds their revenue.
Some think such marriages are ideal because they generate vendors with a healthy mix of proprietary and open source software. This prevents lockin while ensuring commercial provders enjoy a profit.
But will all successful open source companies end up in the clutches of proprietary software titans?
Have IBM, Novell, Sun, Citrix, Oracle and VMware thrown in the towel and see open source as the inevitable future? Or are they simply gobbling up the competition to protect their revenue streams for as long as possible, or making strategic buys to counter their rivals’ open source acquisitions?
I question this each time one of these deals are announced. Call me a cynic. But one has to wonder about the viability of the open source business model if all of the top open source dogs are acquired by traditional software vendors.
It’s understandable that venture capitalists who seed open source companies want to cash out but it would be nice to see another open source business succeed besides Red Hat.
I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to make its first open source acquisition. Care to weigh in on the likely targets?
July 30th, 2009
Microhoo lessons for open source
On the surface the tie-up between Microsoft and Yahoo means nothing to open source.
It’s not a merger. Yahoo’s open source projects remain Yahoo’s. This is in contrast with the Oracle-Sun deal, where Sun’s open source projects were said to be behind Oracle’s interest.
But look more closely. Yahoo’s open source projects are now held by a company that is cash poor. The company will be under enormous pressure to monetize its software assets, and the for-sale sign is already out.
Just this year most crown jewels in the corporate open source crown have changed hands. Java. Hadoop. Open Office. The Yahoo User Interface Library. All just pawns in bigger corporate games.
This may be hard for backers of the corporate open source model, like our own Matt Asay, to explain away. But when you support a corporate open source program, your community efforts are subject to the corporation’s strategic whims.
I return again to a favorite open source analogy, Tom Sawyer “painting” his Aunt Polly’s fence in Mark Twain’s 19th century classic. Who winds up painting the fence? Who gets the credit? Twain meant the tale as a satire of Gilded Age capitalism, the eternal struggle where you knead and bake the bread but I eat it.
Contrast this with corporate community projects such as Eclipse or Apache. What happens with one contributor there has only a limited impact on the community as a whole. Not only does the code abide, but so does the governing structure. That’s protection which goes beyond what you’ll find in a mere software license.
This lesson may prove hard to swallow. Communities can be starved, but corporate projects can ignore community members’ wills if they want. Those who don’t like the terms can fork it, out in the cold cruel world, or they can suck it up.
What Microsoft is saying to open source here, what Oracle said to open source in the Sun deal, was said perhaps most famously by Tom Friedman in regards to the Iraq war.
The polite paraphrase of Friedman’s statement is this. You don’t count.
June 29th, 2009
Red Hat rumors sign of business as usual
The recent rumors of Oracle buying Red Hat are false, but are a good indication that business conditions are becoming normal again. (Picture from League City, Texas.)
The source of the rumor, according to our own Matt Asay, is Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. She’s trying to scare up some merger work, create some action in a slow market.
Both are healthy signs.
If brokers are fishing for merger work, it means there is capacity to do such work, and bankers have come in off the ledges they were on last fall. If action is seen as slow, that’s also good, because banking should be boring.
The substance of this particular rumor is stupid. Oracle has no need for Red Hat, since it has its own Linux business, and as Matt notes the open source buzz is in applications, not the operating system.
What we are seeing, generally, is an attempt to bring back the status quo, with highly-paid bankers and brokers controlling the economy and creating money out of paper.
That’s not happening, not because of regulation but because every recovery is different.
The next recovery will come from the work of companies like Red Hat or, more likely, from Red Hat’s customers, than from the financial services industry.
June 22nd, 2009
Creative destruction in Canada
The creative destruction fostered by the Internet and open source struck Canada hard over the weekend.
Nortel, once one of the Big Three in telecom equipment (Lucent, now part of Alcatel and Siemens were the others) is being broken up for pennies on the dollar. Its stock is now officially worthless.
The end became obvious this weekend in the $650 million sale of its CDMA wireless unit, ironically to a joint venture of Siemens and Nokia. (Their new parent is trying to reassure Nortel LTE employees with an open letter today.)
To anyone whom, like me, went to a Supercomm in the mid-1990s the fall is humbling. But it was both inevitable and necessary.
Inevitable because Nortel, like Siemens and Lucent (the Bell equipment arm before being renamed and spun-out), made most of its money on huge switches for analog phone service, mostly to a small group of carriers.
The Internet killed that business. Voice is a low-bandwidth application.
Even had Nortel seen the handwriting on the wall and moved into the data networking area dominated now by Cisco, it would have quickly faced both the Chinese giant Huawei and open source outfits like Vyatta, killing its margins.
The necessity still has fall-out in Canada’s loss of international business prestige. It reminds me a bit of what happened to Texas banking in the 1980s, when the state’s biggest banks were all sold to competitors in New York, California and North Carolina.
Back then there was a great feeling of loss, a fear the state was losing its autonomy and its economic center. Canadians may feel that way today.
But Texas came back. That’s the point. Canada is much better off nurturing entrepreneurs than trying to bail out the past.
June 16th, 2009
Is Vyatta now part of Microsoft keiretsu?
Maybe my recent trip to Japan is still in my brain, but reading about Citrix leading a new Vyatta funding round provokes the headline question.
A keiretsu, for those scoring at home, originally meant a conglomerate consisting of interlocking companies under central control.
But as I warned my Japanese friends during the recent trip, if we Americans like a word we’ll steal it. Then change it.
In America a keiretsu is more a cross between the Kevin Bacon game and Kremlinology. Market players infer relationships based on who has what link to whom and how close the link is to a dominant company.
Citrix, which also owns Xen, the virtualization company, has long-standing links with Microsoft such that open source advocates routinely think of it as being in Microsoft’s orbit. (The illustration above, from Bob Warfield’s Smoothspan blog, illustrates this keiretsu concept in terms of cloud computing.)
The Citrix-Vyatta link, discussed here by Dan Kusnetsky (who also has the good sense to partner with our own Paula Rooney) is a second-order link. That is, Microsoft links to Citrix links to Vyatta. (A litle like Bacon’s own relation to Hitler, as seen on The Daily Show.)
It’s a delicate dance, especially at times like this when growth capital is so scarce. Time will tell whether Vyatta tilts toward, say, Xen in helping craft customer solutions. Or whether it starts pushing Novell’s Suse Linux over, say, Red Hat. ‘
But people will be watching.
May 28th, 2009
Can Ohloh bring back Sourceforge mojo?
Time to admit a harsh truth. Sourceforge has been going downhill, relative to the market, for a long time now.
Any open source project with any ambition now has its own forge.
So Sourceforge is striking out in a new direction with the acquisition of Ohloh, a directory of open source projects and developers based, ironically, in Bellevue, Washington, a few miles from Microsoft’s corporate campus.
Who is really buying who is revealed in a quote, on the Sourceforge press release, from Ohloh CEO Scott Collison:
“We have long held SourceForge in high regard. We are eager to combine our skills and insights with SourceForge’s credibility and reach in the open source ecosystem and look forward to joining the SourceForge team.”
If Ohloh can turn Sourceforge back into a money spinner it will be good for everyone.
May 8th, 2009
Open source enterprise software shakeout
While poring over reaction to Vignette’s acquisition by Open Text, there was one dog that did not bark.
There was no gloating from the enterprise open source folks.
Why? Probably because the enterprise open source business, especially the content management end, has problems of its own:
- Vendors are under pressure to scale so they can pick off Vignette’s old customers, not to mention those of Interwoven, which was acquired earlier by Autonomy.
- The same economic downdrafts that created the Vignette take-out are also hitting the open source space, in spades. After all, their “customers” don’t have to pay, while Vignette’s do.
Notice the word “vendors” in the first bullet point. As opposed to projects. Whenever a project sponsor incorporates and seeks profit it becomes a vendor, subject to a vendor’s pressures.
Drupal can live on the kindness of strangers, in other words. Acquia can’t.
This may explain why our own Matt Asay (above), instead of noodling over the opportunities Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consolidation may hold, is instead watching John Robert’s exit from SugarCRM, and offering no discouraging words.
Matt is an executive with Alfresco, another open source enterprise software outfit. His loyalties lie in the corporate world, while mine remain tied to journalism.
Open source advocates, as opposed to businessmen, did once have a bone to pick with Roberts. The controversy over “badgeware” was eventually finessed through approval of the Common Public Attribution License, but for a while some were wondering whether SugarCRM was open source at all.
That is all water under the bridge now, but the question remains, how big can open source enterprise outfits get? It’s unlikely that more than a few will be able to brave the current headwinds and scale their support operations to where big customers need them to be.
Will the rest of the pack then simply fade away? That’s what happens in the real world of business. There is only room for a few big businesses at the top of the mountain.
And, again, Acquia is a business, just like Alfresco is a business. Businesses are subject to pressures that projects may not be. And when the business built around a project fails, or gets absorbed, what happens then to the project underneath it?
I have been asking that question a lot regarding Oracle and such projects as OpenOffice, but it’s even more meaningful to business software projects than those in the consumer space.
What happens to projects, and to software, as the enterprise open source market consolidates?
May 4th, 2009
How far can Springsource scale?
I have a long-time bias in favor of Springsource.
Their management has always impressed me with their professionalism. So I was not surprised this weekend to learn they are buying Hyperic, or to quote the press release ” substantially all of the assets of Hyperic.”
Good management doesn’t overpay in a downturn.
Our own Matt Asay then put up an intriguing headline. “SpringSource acquires Hyperic, takes on IBM and Microsoft.”
This led me to some intriguing questions:
- Are they ready to play that game?
- Will they ever be?
- Will any open source pure play ever be?
I read to the end of Matt’s piece and he didn’t back down. IBM and Microsoft can “build, run, and manage applications” and now so can Springsource.
Really? I buy build, I can even get into run, but manage? Anyone who has read The MysticalMythical Man Month knows that as projects scale, project management must scale.
Open source is powerful, in part, because it effectively breaks systems down into pieces and puts small groups in charge of each piece. Open source as a business reflects this reality. Most manage just one project, some manage a few, very few run several.
Moreover, IBM and Microsoft don’t just run their own projects, but customers’ projects. Their biggest projects. Project management of large systems is completely different from supporting software. Can any open source company, even Springsource, scale to deliver that?
And if one did would those who believe in open source be happy with them? Or would we immediately start throwing bricks through their virtual windows, shouting how unclean they were?
April 21st, 2009
Will Oracle-Sun deal close?
While some analysts are already imagining big Sun job cuts or poring over its real estate, a few are asking the obvious follow-up.
Will this deal go through?
That’s not an academic question. Despite offering Oracle a $260 million “break-up fee,” Sun is trading at $9.18 per share, a huge jump from Friday but still short of the price Oracle is offering.
With an offer on the table Sun is now officially “in play” and it is not inconceivable that another bidder, such as IBM, could come in with a higher bid. Officially Big Blue is unruffled, but merger fans are already speculating on what might come next.
As noted yesterday, this deal makes Oracle a hardware player for the first time. It complicates matters for IBM, which has long made its money with open source and suddenly finds a rival controlling more face cards.
Avoiding this tectonic shift could push IBM to raise its bid. Or, knowing the real value of Sun’s assets, it could look somewhere else.
Second, what about the anti-trust implications? Analysts fingered worry beads for years that Oracle was monopolizing the database market with its acquisitions. Now it would control the open source alternative?
At minimum this deal will take several months to close. This means, for the first time, major open source projects like Java, OpenOffice.org, mySQL and Solaris are in limbo. There is uncertainty, something markets hate, which leaves anyone dealing with Sun hesitant.
So, how long do you think it will take to create Snorkel? And will it become a real threat to IBM, or more of an Urkel?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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