Showing posts with label middleware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label middleware. Show all posts

08 April 2009

Open Access as "Middleware"

Interesting simile:

A "legacy system" in the world of computing provides a useful analogy for understanding the precarious state of contemporary academic publishing. This comparison might also keep us from stepping backward in the very act of stepping forward in promoting Open Access publishing and Institutional Repositories. I will argue that, vital as it is, the Open Access movement should really be seen in its current manifestation as academic "middleware" servicing the "legacy system" of old-school scholarship.

(Via Open Access News.)

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13 August 2007

Red Hat Meets Eclipse

Here's an interesting example of major open source projects meeting to produce a highly-targeted commercial product:

Red Hat Developer Studio is a set of eclipse-based development tools that are pre-configured for JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platforms and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developers are not required to use Red Hat Developer Studio to develop on JBoss Enterprise Middleware and/or Red Hat Linux. But, many find these pre-configured tools offer significant time-savings and value, making them more productive and speeding time to deployment.

06 March 2007

Exadel's Open Source Cornucopia

Now here's a real confluence:


Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Exadel, the leader in providing rich application components for creating a new generation of enterprise solutions, today announced a strategic partnership that will add mature, Eclipse-based developer tools for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and rich, Web 2.0 applications to Red Hat's integrated platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This move marks the first time that a high caliber set of Eclipse-based developer tools will be available in open source.

Exadel will open source all of its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, as well as consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org, the community behind open source projects that roll up into JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In turn, Red Hat will work jointly with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam.

So, here we have a company open sourcing its products, through a collaboration with Red Hat. As well as confirming the latter's central position in the open source ecosystem, it also boost Eclipse and Java while it's at it.

That's a pretty powerful payload from one announcement, and testimony to the multiplicative effects of open source, which tends to empower everything within its range, unlike proprietary moves, which are generally subtractive, damaging other offerings.

02 January 2007

ObjectWeb of Desire

Unless you're deep into middleware, you've probably never heard of ObjectWare, creators of the JOnAS software. But something interesting is happening: ObjectWare is merging with OrientWare:

an open organization that integrates the mature results achieved by the 863 Program in the domain of middleware by universities and institutes such as Beihang University, Peking University, the Institute of software for Chinese Science Academie and National University of Defense Technology etc. Orientware code base is a collaborative composition of various middleware platforms, such as CORBA, J2EE, TP-Monitor, Portal and Workflow built on open and standard technical specifications. The goal is to provide a comprehensive middleware platform for the Chinese national information infrastructure that could challenge its foreign counterparties with respect to performance and functionality.

Global middleware (globalware?): sounds good to me.

24 April 2006

Burning Down the House

After middleware, now business intelligence. Burning down the house (of closed source) - seeping up the stack.

10 February 2006

Scrying an Oracle

This story has so many interesting elements in it that it's just got to be true.

According to Business Week, Oracle is poised to snap up no less than three open source companies: JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat Software. JBoss - which calls itself the "professional open source company", making everyone else unprofessional, I suppose - is one of the highest-profile players in this sector. Not least because its founder, the Frenchman Marc Fleury, has a tongue as sharp as his mind (you can sample his blog with this fab riff on genomics, Intelligent Design and much else).

His controversial remarks and claims in the past have not always endeared him to others in the free software world. Take, for example, the "disruptive Professional Open Source model" he proudly professes, "which combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the enterprise and give CIOs peace of mind." Hmm, I wonder what Richard Stallman has to say about that.

JBoss has been highly successful in the middleware market: if you believe the market research, JBoss is the leader in the Java application server sector. Oracle's acquisition would make a lot of sense, since databases on their own aren't much fun these days: you need middleware to hook them up to the Internet, and JBoss fits the bill nicely. It should certainly bolster Oracle in its battle against IBM and Microsoft in the fiercely-fought database sector.

While many might regard the swallowing up of an ambivalent JBoss by the proprietary behemoth Oracle as just desserts of some kind, few will be happy to see Zend suffer the same fate. Zend is the company behind the PHP scripting language - one of the most successful examples of free software. (If you're wondering, PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" - employing your standard hacker recursive acronym naming convention).

Where JBoss is mostly key for companies running e-commerce Web sites, say, PHP is a core technology of the entire open source movement. Its centrality is indicated by the fact that it is one of the options for the ubiquitous LAMP software stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl or Python. The fact that Oracle will own the engine that powers PHP will be worrying for many in the free software world.

About Sleepycat, I can only say: er, who? - but that's just ignorance on my part. This article explains that Sleepycat's product, Berkeley DB, is actually the "B" in LAMP. Got that? The Sleepycat blog may throw some more light on this strange state of affairs - or maybe not.

Whatever the reason that Oracle wants to get its mitts on Sleepycat as well as Zend and JBoss, one thing is abundantly clear if these rumours prove true: Oracle is getting very serious about open source.

In the past, the company has had just about the most tortuous relationship with open source of any of the big software houses. As I wrote in Rebel Code, in early July 1998, an Oracle representative said "we're not seeing a big demand from our customer that we support it" - "it" being GNU/Linux. And yet just two weeks later, Oracle announced that it was porting Oracle8 to precisely that platform. This was one of the key milestones in the acceptance of free software by business: no less a person than Eric Raymond told me that "the Oracle port announcement...made the open source concept unkillable by mere PR" - PR from a certain company being a big threat in the early days of corporate adoption.

Open source has come on by leaps and bounds since then, and these moves by Oracle are not nearly so momentous - at least for free software. But I wonder whether the otherwise canny Larry Ellison really knows what he's getting into.

Until now, Oracle has mainly interacted with open source through GNU/Linux - that is, at arm's length. If it takes these three companies on board - especially if it acquires Zend - it will find itself thrown into the maelstrom of open source culture. Here's a hint for Mr Ellison: you don't get to assimilate that culture, whatever you might be thinking of doing with the companies. You either work with it, or it simply routes around you.

Yes, I'm talking about forks here: if Oracle misplays this, and tries to impose itself on the PHP or JBoss communities, I think it will be in for a rude surprise. To its credit, IBM really got this, which is why its embrace of open source has been so successful. Whether Oracle can follow in its footsteps, only time will tell.

But the rumoured acquisitions, if they go ahead, will have one other extremely significant effect. They will instantly add credibility, viability and desirability to a host of other second-generation open source companies that have grown up in the last few years. Free software will gain an immediate boost, and hackers will suddenly find themselves in great demand again.

Given the astonishing lift-off of Google's share price, and the palpable excitement surrounding Web 2.0 technologies (and the start-ups that are working on them), the hefty price-tags on open source companies being bandied around in the context of Oracle have a feeling of déjà-vu all over again: didn't we go through all this with Red Hat and VA Linux a few years back?

You don't have to be clairvoyant - or an oracle - to see that if these deals go through, the stage is well and truly set for Dotcom Delirium 2.0.