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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: Cloud Computing
November 23rd, 2009
Google goes all-in with an open source cloud
Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software.
This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it.
As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.
It’s like America’s nuclear advantage during the Cold War. Anyone who sought to compete with America in terms like throw-weight would bankrupt themselves. President Reagan encouraged this competition and the Soviet Union bankrupted itself.
So as Google enters the cloud computing wars with outfits like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it is to its advantage that there be no proprietary software advantage. On a level playing field it dominates. They’re the New York Yankees without a salary cap.
Openness, represented by open source and Internet standards, are all to Google’s advantage. This is why opponents of open standards, like Scott Cleland, go to such rhetorical lengths to claim that open standards are, in fact, proprietary. If open standards are proprietary you can set closed standards without harm to the market.
But open standards set terms of competition that advantage the low-cost producer of bits and processing. The question for policymakers, both public and private, is what the terms of competition will be, not who wins.
Cleland and other Bell apologists want their clients to win. Thus they support regulation based on scarcity, under which the winner is the outfit that can hire the most apologists. I own no Google stock, and I make no money from Google. Never have. Probably never will. (If I do I’ll let you know.)
We should set terms of competition that advantage consumers, not particular producers, and that reward plenty rather than scarcity. By that standard Google’s dominance is a fair one, fairly obtained, and so long as it’s not abused it’s a good thing.
In making its cloud open source, Google shows it understands this.
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 19th, 2009
ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall
An Australian friend wrote yesterday with a question:
I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.
It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.
So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?
These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.
It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.
Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.
This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.
All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.
What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.
Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.
What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.
Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.
That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.
With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.
Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.
Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.
November 19th, 2009
MindTouch launches its open source cloud
You can argue that clouds are fast becoming synonymous with SaaS, but MindTouch has launched its own cloud to serve up its open source collaboration solution.
MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)
Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.
You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.
Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.
Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.
Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.
November 17th, 2009
What a decade taught Larry Augustin
At 46, Larry Augustin is much too young to be the grand old man of anything.
But he is one of the grand old figures of open source. He was in the group that coined the term back in the late 1990s.
Larry was Sourceforge, he was VA Linux, back during the dot-boom 10 years ago. He rode the stock to $240/share, then watched it plummet to nearly nothing in the dot-bomb.
Once had had a Web site, made it run. Made it race against time. Once he had a Web site, now it’s done, buddy can you spare a dime?
But Larry kept his hand in. He became an angel investor and adviser, a “go-to” guy for any open source start-up looking for some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number two.)
The news today is that Larry is the permanent CEO of SugarCRM. Appointed on an interim basis in May to replace co-founder John Roberts, he has pointed the software into the cloud, adding a business model to its large community.
What has he learned in that time?
- Influence is not a contest among bloggers. Augustin’s last blog post is dated July.
- Companies grow through teams. The next negative word about SugarCRM’s people I hear from Larry will be the first.
- The future of open source is in SaaS, in the cloud.
Larry Augustin’s story is proof that second acts in business are possible. Most of those who boomed during the dot-boom were never heard from after the dot-bomb. But not Larry.
His story reminds me of the man who was managing my Atlanta Braves when I first moved here in the early 1980s. He won a pennant, got fired, got kicked around. He got a few gigs, did some broadcasting, advised a few people here and there.
Then he got another shot, in New York, and he took it. His second chance made Joe Torre a sure Hall of Famer.
I can’t guarantee Larry Augustin the same success, but after a decade in the wilderness he has a team again. Hard for me not to root for the “old guy.”
November 4th, 2009
Sam Ramji has his head in the clouds
Sam Ramji, formerly the face of open source at Microsoft (cue the Star Wars music) is settling into a new life as vice president for strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.
He told me it suits him.
“Instead of pushing boulders up the hill I’m going down the hill. Sonoa has 65 employees. I talk to customers directly, daily, instead of monthly. There’s less operational overhead. So I’m getting out more, talking at events more, talking to journalists and analysts more.
“At Microsoft there is no such thing as a staff job. You have to always be driving strategy, be a subject matter expert, and get into detail as much as necessary. I had a 120 person team in a 90,000 person organization.
“As Vice President for Strategy at Sonoa Systems I’m a one man show.” He also gets more family time — he describes himself on his personal blog as an “avid husband and father of two.”
That blog (now part of the blogroll here) is also now a great place to get Ramji’s honest views on cloud computing, CodePlex, and open source in general, as in this piece “free is not the opposite of commercial.”
Ramji describes 
Sonoa as being among the many start-ups working to define what will become the LAMP stack of cloud computing. (That’s a close-up of its home page, describing its offerings, to the left.)
This means competitors are often collaborators. “We’re all trying to figure out how our technologies connect” with the primary competition coming from clients’ in-house development.
He described one Sonoa solution, for MTV, involving RightScale, Amazon, Sonoa and Xen, all working together. “It seems like we do the same thing, but when we get deployed you realize that managing the virtual infrastructure is different from managing cloud service traffic. Stacks are just starting to emerge and each component is important.”
So Ramji has gone from a world where everything is defined and the fight is continuous to one where nothing is defined and contention is nebulous. It’s more wide-open and, he says, more fun.
So there is life after Microsoft, in the clouds.
November 3rd, 2009
Yahoo does right by Traffic Server
It’s easy to become obsessive over whether a piece of code is open source.
How code becomes open source can be just as important. Is it being given the resources and sponsorship necessary to grow? Or is it being tossed over the side of a sinking ship?
By those standards, Yahoo has done its Traffic Server, acquired early this decade along with Inktomi, a solid service, placing the code with Apache.
The code is available right now from Apache’s incubator. This brings the number of incubator projects to 36.
Traffic Server is designed to optimize Web sites by caching popular content at the network edge, closer to users. It’s not something Google needs — they have their own solution — but it could be very useful for relatively new, fast-growing sites. It can keep them from going down when everyone “rushes to the rail” for access.
The software is being released in time for ApacheCon, which plans a Meetup on the software at 8 PST tonight. If you’re at the Con go to Room 4. There you can get the lowdown on features, performance and history from people who have actually written code.
Shelton Shugar of Yahoo told CNET’s Stephen Shankland that Yahoo hopes Traffic Server grows like Hadoop, the cloud computing technology that has since spawned the start-up Cloudera.
What do you think it can be?
October 29th, 2009
Ubuntu Karmic Koala launches
Ubuntu 9:10, known as Karmic Koala, has officially been launched at Ubuntu.
Correction The original story incorrectly identified reviews for the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10 as being for the final version of Ubuntu 9.10.
It comes in desktop and server editions, which have been getting wildly different reviews.
Reviews on the release candidate of the desktop version are negative, due to the fact you can’t run multiple drives with the current code base. This means a netbook user may be happy but a desktop user (my desktop has three hard drives) will not be satisfied at all.
The server version is getting stronger reviews thanks to its support for clouds. By using Eucalyptus the company has a decent cloud implementation that should make it more competitive with Red Hat, at least in Europe. (Canonical offices are close to the European mainland.)
Drop your own experiences with the new Ubuntu into the talkback thread below. We’ll be waiting.
October 26th, 2009
Ubuntu celebrates Thursday drop of koala desktop and server
Ubuntu held a teleconference this afternoon to celebrate the Thursday launch of its new desktop and server edition, karmic koala.
The new desktop is built around “Ubuntu One,”a collection of backup, note and contact synchronization and file-sharing services integrated into the operating system, offering 2 Gigabytes of free storage and more by subscription.
The Firefox 3.5 browser and improved audio support are also part of the offering. GNOME 2.28 is the shipping desktop interface.
On the server side the situation is more cloudy, but in a good way with the addition of full support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, from Eucalyptus Systems, that lets you create your own mini-cloud based on open source. The clouds feature host and guest virtualization under KVM and guest virtualization under Xen.
Most new features were previewed in April.
A complete online tour of the new desktop is already online. A list of supported netbooks is available, but the company is suggesting you pack a thumb drive with its Ubuntu Netbook Remix when you go to the store, just to make sure. Should make Friday at Fry’s fun.
October 20th, 2009
Nimsoft takes another step forward in cloud monitoring
Nimsoft, which specializes in monitoring tools for data centers, is entering the cloud market.
CEO Gary Read said that, as of today, all the company’s performance monitors will become available for external environments, meaning they can deal with hosted providers, managed services, SaaS or clouds.
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“The computing infrastructure of the future will no longer be hosted internally by the customer, but customers will have a combination of internal and external resources. They’ll want to see the performance and service across that entire environment.”
The initial release will cover the Amazon cloud and Rackspace, but Read said the company is taking measurements on Salesforce.com and has plans to expand to Microsoft and Google cloud offerings.
Read insisted this is not like those “cloud weather reports” we wrote about last year. <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
“You haven’t been able to monitor a single customer’s usage, and you haven’t been able to pull all the different threads, and combine that with an internal environment, into a single integrated view of the service delivery.
That’s the big play. It’s not about one provider. It’s about pulling all the threads together, because everything then becomes part of the same fabric of service delivery.”
Read said that, for cloud vendors, his move and that of his competitors will help in cloud adoption and make clouds common parts of computing infrastructure.
The company will be hosting a Web conference on its site today to discuss the new release and new direction. I wonder if the name “rainbow” is taken?
October 8th, 2009
Moore's Law of Software is the key to the cloud
In my new e-book on technology history, Moore’s Lore, I devote a special chapter to what I call Moore’s Law of Software.
Fact is there is no Moore’s Law of Software. Productivity has improved over the years, but arithmetically. Code is still being written, and tested, by hand. Software falls further behind hardware every year.
In his excellent Cloud Computing Rethink series over at C|Net, Cisco’s James Urquhart yesterday revealed a very important truth about the cloud that most executives and analysts have not fully understood.
This is all about programmer productivity.
Urquhart begins by describing what Forte Software tried to do with 4GL 15 years ago, offering it as a utopian past that cloud computing hopes to rediscover.
it starts this journey with an economic model that budgets can accommodate, and Urquhart then issues a call for better development tools. It’s the loyalty of software developers that must be won, and their shared endeavor can rebuild the 4GL utopia.
That shared endeavor is what connects cloud computing to open source. The same force that drives open source forward, developers sharing and improving tools, also drives the cloud, Urquhart writes.
It’s a brilliant insight.
That’s what the Amazon and Google brands bring to the party, software development environments that can be turned into profitable services quickly. As he explains:
How much more powerful is AWS with other developer-focused services, such as DevPay, Simple Queue Service, and Elastic Map Reduce? This attracts developers, which in turn attracts CPU/hrs and GB/hrs.
I keep thinking of one of these cloud guys doing the Ballmer dance. A Ballmer dance in the clouds?
September 25th, 2009
Which is more reliable, the client or the cloud
I understand GMail was out again yesterday.
Our Stephen Shankland notes this was the fourth outage of the year.
Education blogger Chris Dawson calls this a game of “unrealistic expectations.” The tweets were all a-Twitter about it, but the big fail whale has been on their screen so much this year that cable news viewers now know what it is.
Online services have brief outages all the time, and it can be funny when it happens. In a store, or at the library, workers stand around helplessly. They have forgotten how to take cash or make change.
But we’re facing a choice, as users, and as a market. We have increasingly bloated clients, and (apparently) unreliable SaaS and cloud networks to serve them.
Which side is going to win?
Having watched technology evolve for nearly 3 decades, I have seen this pattern repeat-and-repeat. We build something, it’s great, so we grow it and it gets bloated. So we go somewhere else and start building that.
It happened with PCs, with LANs, with the Internet, with mobile, and even with open source. Even Linux is now bloated.
So what’s the answer? This does not happen with hardware. Hardware is highly reliable, increasingly so, as it becomes more complex. Anything relying on software, however, is increasingly prone to breakage as it grows.
Knowing this, will you rely on the client or on the cloud?
Loading ...September 23rd, 2009
Why Africa gets the IBM-Ubuntu bundle and you do not
Irregular readers of this space may be wondering why IBM and Ubuntu are partnering on a Linux bundle for Africa but not here.
It’s something regular readers should have memorized by now.
There is a price lower than free.
Note the go-to-market strategy, as detailed by our fearless leader Larry Dignan:
IBM said it will distribute the SmartWork client through Africa via local service providers such as Inkululeko and ZSL Inc. The aim is to spread the IBM/Canonical software through government and educational institutions and businesses.
The short version is that IBM and Canonical (Ubuntu’s commercial arm) are mainly going to load the software on government and ISP servers, then wait for the clients to come to them.
This is not how developed markets work. Developed markets work through distribution. Vendors must invest heavily to push product through the channel, as well as support it. This is why Taiwanese OEMs abandoned Linux for Windows last year.
Netbook hardware will ship to Africa running Windows, but the IBM download will transform those machines into Ubuntu devices that handle some client functions locally but can also go online to connect people together. This is a good deal for IBM because its investment is low and already made up in favorable publicity.
My problem is the cloud. We already know how bad Africa’s online links are. When the best broadband in South Africa is outrun by a pigeon with a stick memory strapped to its leg, we are talking s-l-o-w. The infrastructure there just can’t handle a cloud-based solution.
Instead of offering the software via download, it might be better to put sticks on thousands of pigeons and just let them loose.
In fact the real hope is that the endorsement of a government or university will make this a standard offering on their local networks.
It’s up to Canonical to make all this work. Founder Mark Shuttleworth is South African by birth. This deal has his name written all over it. It will be an immense challenge to scale this effort up, assuming the IBM name and Shuttleworth’s fame lead governments to support it.
And you have to figure that if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere…but he can’t even try for New York until he has scaled a solution thousands are happy with.
September 23rd, 2009
BIND is not just legacy freeware
In pushing his SaaS DNS offering, Skye, general manager John Shalowitz has his marketing department partying like it’s 1999.
The open source BIND system that has held the Internet together for decades is “freeware,” he sniffs to ZDNet UK’s Toby Wolfe. “Freeware legacy DNS is the Internet’s dirty little secret.”
What’s wrong with that statement? Just about everything. Open source is not just freeware, calling something legacy just means it’s tested, and there has never been anything secret about BIND, dirty or otherwise.
Or as Yosemite Sam told Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare, “Dem’s fightin’ woids.”
As to Skye, what can we say? We don’t know what’s in it. It’s proprietary. Shalowitz is basically using wordplay to say what proprietary vendors have told the market for ages. “Trust me.”
And when you’re talking about “cloud-based DNS,” you’re basically trusting someone to do a hosted version of every domain name lookup your company may want to do, now or in the future. You not only toss BIND, but all your internal DNS knowledge out the window, renting a service in which you will never get equity.
It all depends on how you look at it.
Skye comes from Nominum, which has been offering proprietary DNS software for years. Nominum knows its business, but it also knows that BIND is not a piece of garbage hacked together by a couple of college students in their dorm room. It’s a tested package with a long pedigree.
BIND is the reference implementation for the DNS protocols, and remains the most widely-used DNS software on the Internet. To call it “legacy”and “freeware” in pushing a proprietary alternative on mid-sized companies is just several steps beyond silly.
Of course the real question remains, will the pitch work?
September 3rd, 2009
Young man yells at cloud
Blogger-novelist-activist Cory Doctorow is out today with a screed condemning the whole idea of cloud computing.
(Here he is in Wikipedia. Doesn’t that live somewhere in the cloud?)
Here is a summary.
The Man is trying to put us down. It’s all a conspiracy to make us pay for what we could do ourselves for free. The corporate shills want to control our machines and through them, our brains.
I agree with Doctorow on many things. On other things I’m sympathetic.
On this he’s dead wrong.
Running a PC is a hassle. There are software updates, there are anti-virals and anti-spyware and registry cleaners to worry about. It can take five minutes for even a Netbook to boot up, and another five minutes to shut it down.
Hardware is not the issue. Client hardware is an incredible bargain. The issue here is software.
All the problems now endemic to Windows machines are slowly infiltrating the worlds of the Mac and Linux, too. This has to do with the size and complexity of modern operating systems, and the large number of very nasty people working overtime to break them.
Maybe, if you have just one laptop, you can deal with this expense and hassle. But even small companies may now have 10-20 or more PCs running at once. The expenses of managing clients are driving companies to the wall.
The idea of the cloud is to abstract this complexity, take it out of the hands of users and put it in the hands of experts. One set of experts can handle the hassles of thousands of users, and hundreds of companies, for less than those users and companies are paying now.
Or as Mark Twain once said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.”
As to the broader market, Mr. Doctorow has one kid, a toddler. Congratulations. I have three PCs, my dear wife runs three, my daughter has two and my son has a desktop for gaming with a terabyte of storage.
We use both wired and wireless networking to keep it all together. Several times a year I lose a day of work scrabbling around on my knees, under a desk, trying to check wiring. I have a repair guy on speed dial. I’m not that unusual, and becoming less so all the time.
The complexity and vulnerability of PCs means you can’t just run one. I always have my Netbook on standby for emergencies. If malware infects me, or the cable goes out, I can be at a local coffee shop within minutes.
I no longer even trust my PC for really important stuff. That goes on a USB stick. You can get a 32 Gigabyte stick these days for about $70. Next week it will be less. Wear it around your neck, plug it into the cloud anywhere and, if everything works right, there you are.
Now Doctorow has valid concerns. Networks are not yet built to handle massive use of clouds. The legal environment for cloud users is, well, cloudy.
Fact is these are early days. In PC time it’s 1978. In Internet time it’s still 1994.
What 30 years of experience tells me is that condemning the future when you don’t know what it looks like is never a wise move.
September 2nd, 2009
Red Hat seeks respect for JBoss and ecosystem
Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Red Hat can’t seem to get any respect.
Reporters hang on every plot twist at Sun, at Firefox, and at Silicon Valley’s open source start-ups, while Raleigh-based Red Hat plugs away, dominating the enterprise Linux market, and the press just yawns.
Even Wall Street feels that way. Since its break-out performance of 2005 Red Hat has mainly traded sideways. Moving to the New York Stock Exchange has not changed the trend.
It might be because, except for its 2006 acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat has kept its head down and focused on business.
This week, with its Red Hat Summit and JBoss World show in Chicago, is no exception. While banging the drum for a webcasted press conference at noon today, Red Hat has announced the following items:
- A program to link its partner ecosystem.
- A Java Application Platform targeted at clouds.
- Version 2.3 of the JBoss Operations Network.
- A new certification for JBoss application administrators.
- An open source lab with 60 workstations donated to Carnegie-Mellon.
The only factoid that might wake up sleeping journos here is that the new Carnegie-Mellon lab will be housed in the Gates Center, made possible by a big donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Having covered technology for nearly three decades I can state as a fact that there is a big difference between West Coast and East Coast tech companies. East coast outfits tend to be staid and stable, and are often linked in some way to IBM, which epitomizes that style.
But here’s something you probably did not know. Over the last year Red Hat stock, now traded under the symbol RHT, has outperformed the S&P 500, outperformed the Dow Jones average, and even outperformed Microsoft. Its gain in that time is only about 7.5%, but it has gained while others have suffered.
Respect that.
September 1st, 2009
Microsoft lover Citrix as heroine of the open source cloud
Five days after joining its friend Microsoft in walking away from rival VMWorld’s virtualization show, Citrix is portraying itself as the best friend of open source ever with the launch of the Xen Cloud Platform, an open source alternative to VMWare’s vCloud service.
The announcement was linked to Xen.org, the open source project Citrix has sponsored since acquiring Xensource in 2007.
The folks at Forrester call this a bold move, with Linux as its domain 0, a move toward greater cloud compatibility.
The political machinations here are complex. Maintain compatibility with VMWare and deploy your own open source cloud by aligning with an outfit Microsoft was said to be be ready to buy a year ago. (Our own Jason Perlow was among those asking the question, as shown at right.)
In fact the Citrix-Microsoft relationship has always been rather fraught, with analysts like Brian Madden asking who is controlling who.
So now both Citrix and Microsoft are acting like gate-crashers at VMWare’s party, claiming their solution is simpler than VMWare’s own vCenter suite. Oh, and more open source centric.
Can anyone out there relieve this headache I’m getting? I am certain a lover of soap operas can explain it. Meanwhile my question is, where does the interest of open source really lie in all this?
August 12th, 2009
If you have a proprietary partner is it still open source?
JasperSoft, an open source provider of business intelligence (BI) software, and Talend, which offers open source data integration, are teaming with two proprietary vendors, the Vertica analytic database folks and RightScale cloud management companies, to deliver a BI solution for clouds.
But should this blog be covering it? Is this really an open source story?
Part of me says no.
You have to sign contracts with all four vendors to produce a solution. The result could bring smaller firms into the BI universe, and could even create some BI VARs, but you should compare costs, benefits, and terms to what you would get from a proprietary vendor, not an open source one.
Part of me also says shut up, Dana.
This blog covers open source. Both JasperSoft and Talend qualify. This partnership delivers a BI solution that lowers costs and offers more flexibility. Is that not what open source is all about?
While some analysts consider BI to be “recession proof,” that’s a function of the underlying technology. I still know of large companies in the Atlanta area that rely on spreadsheets, not customized BI databases, for handling major projects. BI vendors face a learning curve that goes beyond technology, one that has more to do with management training.
So even proprietary rivals of JasperSoft may have something to applaud here. If you can give companies a taste of the technology, without requiring a big investment, that grows the market for everyone. In this case the cloud lowers the market entry point to the ground. Does that make it a fog solution?
Anyway, does this offering make sense from an open source perspective? Is this the future of open source business collaboration? Are hybrids the way to go in the cloud as well as on the road?
The market will decide.
August 11th, 2009
Cutting out for Cloudera just in time
Cynics will say that Doug Cutting barely waited for the magnetic ink to dry on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal before announcing he would jump the Yahoo ship for Cloudera, a start-up that is commercializing his Hadoop project. (Picture from Facebook.)
The timing was coincidental, he insisted. In a blog post he heaped fulsome praise on Yahoo and said that at Cloudera he will be “well-positioned to help it mature,” it meaning Hadoop.
It’s a well-considered, mature move from a well-considered, mature man. Cutting has been involved in search technology for over two decades, since long before the Web was spun. He was a whiz kid. Now he’s a wise man.
As a wise man who needs to feed a family Cutting moves from position-to-position carefully. Like a great actor he moves for the work, not the money. During his career he has worked at Apple, he once worked at Excite, he even worked for Xerox PARC!
The move to Cloudera is, in some ways, his riskiest move yet.
Cloudera is, technically, still a start-up with just 20 employees. Bad things can happen at good start-ups. Cutting is moving in part because Hadoop co-founder Mike Cafarella is already on-board there, but as Cloudera’s own blog notes, Cafarella will take a full-time position at the University of Michigan in December.
I’ve been calling programming a young man’s game since I was a young man. I’m not young any longer. So seeing Doug Cutting at Cloudera also makes me smile. I hope it makes you smile as well.
It’s time for the grown-ups to show what they can do.
August 5th, 2009
Microsoft admits the obvious but not the truth
In its latest 10-K report Microsoft admits what we already knew. Open source has run away with its lunch money. (Picture from MeallDubh.org, the blog of John McCreesh.)
A whole bunch of companies are identified as villains. Springsource. Canonical. RedHat. Google.
What Microsoft does not admit here is the truth. Look at that list of “competitors” again. Other than Google — which gets is money from ads — are any of them more than a a bug heading for the Microsoft windshield?
What threatens Microsoft is not an open source company, or a collection of open source companies, but the open source model.
Microsoft can maintain its share only by offering subsidized software as an alternative to free. But it can’t maintain its margins. It’s going to have a tough time maintaining profitability.
But Microsoft has an even bigger problem than the open source business model.
The big sea change over the last years, the force Microsoft can’t keep up with, is the cheap client. A Netbook may sell with a $3 copy of Windows XP, but how much software will the owner of a $300 product buy?
Fact is, even when the support is online, Windows costs money to support. It costs money to create patches and updates, money for servers to push those patches out. It’s money that has to be spent, because without it Microsoft clients get infected with malware and become useless.
By contrast Linux is modular. A Linux client, whether a netbook or an Android phone, needs to run only those modules necessary to the function it is performing at that moment. Over time open source is just cheaper to support. And by linking clients to the cloud you centralize that support load, even monetize it.
So you have competitors who can live on less food than you need, hardware evolving toward forms that must find a lower-cost form of support, and a possible breakthrough in business models that you can’t seem to touch.
The truth is that Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft itself, have become dinosaurs in a mammalian world. To compete Microsoft must evolve.
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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