Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called “Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement“, which began:
Can Larry Ellison be stopped? By which I mean could Oracle shut down the fledgling open-source software movement through a series of acquisitions??
On Linux Journal.
I've often written about particular instances where Microsoft has bullied competitors; it's a pretty sorry tale. But that story becomes extraordinary when told in detail, and as a sequence of actions whose sole purpose was to drive off competition by any means.
If you're interested in how Microsoft sought to undermine DR-DOS, WordPerfect, Netscape and Java - to say nothing of GNU/Linux - you can find out here in this document from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS). As you might guess from the subject matter of the report, this is a bunch of companies who are not overly enamoured of Microsoft:ECIS has acted as an advocate of interoperability since its inception in 1989. The association believes strongly in the benefits of a competitive and innovative ICT sector, and seeks to support such an environment by actively participating in the promotion of any initiative aimed at favoring interoperability, competition on the merits, innovation, and consumers' interests in the area of information and communication technology.
ECIS’ members include large and smaller information and communications technology hardware and software providers Adobe Systems, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.
Leaving aside the sad fact that a European organisation can't spell "favouring", it's pretty clear that this is not an objective, balanced picture. But as far as I can tell, it's not untruthful, and its statements are butteressed with references to relevant documents and news items that make it useful for further exploration.
Bad IBM:
IBM today announced that it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM's 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceed the issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google -- combined.
Good IBM:
IBM used the occasion to announce plans to help stimulate innovation and economic growth. The company plans to increase by 50% -- to more than 3,000 -- the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection. This will make these inventions freely available to others.
Er, could we perhaps make up our minds about intellectual monopolies? Either you're in favour - and want more or them - or against - and want less. You know, the old binary thing. Is it that hard?
If you have a good memory, you might recall a 2003 research paper from Goldman Sachs called “Fear the Penguin”....
On Open Enterprise blog.
As I've lamented before, open source usage in China is hard for us outside to gauge. Even the open source structures there are difficult to discern. So news that the Linux Foundation is linking up with something called the Chinese OSS Promotion Union is interesting:COPU now has over 300 members, covering nearly all the domestic enterprises and public institution units in the field of open source, including all the Linux distributions including Red Flag, Co-Create, China Standard Soft, TurboLinux, and Sun Wah, universities (over 200), and institutes for scientific research, standard, law and industry. COPU also has over 20 multinational companies as its members who have their representative offices or branches in China including IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Oracle, SAP, NEC, CA, BEA, Hitachi, Sybase, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Google.
Or should that be Open Social? - That's what a certain Marc Andreessen (now, where have I heard that name before?) calls it, and he should know:
My company, Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.
In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:
* "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...
* "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:
* With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
* With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.
What this shows, for the nth time, is that the future history of computing is about the race towards openness, and that the company that opens up the most - as in totally - wins. Google seems to get that, even if there are still a few dark corners of its soul that could do with some sunlight.
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) recently surveyed their members about open source and has now published their findings. A few highlights:
-More than one third of the respondents reported that they have deployed an open source database in production, which is a higher rate than for open source tools, frameworks or applications.
-Nearly three-quarters of that group have MySQL installed
Three-quarters? Wow. Bear in mind that MySQL, just like Linux before it, will become more powerful, nudging Oracle from underneath. Classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff. Maybe time to worry a little, eh Larry?
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between Larry "Ninja" Ellison's personal plaything, aka Oracle, and the hacker's scripting tape-duct duct-tape of choice, PHP. And yet the miracle that is open source is able to bring even these polar opposites together in an act of seamless connectivity:Continuing to deliver on its long-standing commitment to the Open Source community, Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.
...
The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems.
(Via Alan Lord.)
I have mixed feelings about Adobe's new Apollo:Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s [Rich Internet Applications].
On the one hand, it has the F-word in there, and as readers of this blog may know, I am totally allergic to Flash. On the other hand, this seems promising:We spent a considerable amount of time researching a number of HTML rendering engines for use in Apollo. We had four main criteria, all of which WebKit met:
* Open project that we could contribute to
* Proven technology, that web developers and end users are familiar with
* Minimum effect on Apollo runtime size
* Proven ability to run on mobile devices
While the final decision was difficult, we felt that WebKit is the best match for Apollo at this time.
We shall see (now, if only the Delphic oracle were still around....)
Time to throw those hats in the air, methinks:Red Hat, Inc. the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2007 third quarter.
Total revenue for the quarter was $105.8 million, an increase of 45% from the year-ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $88.9 million, up 48% year-over-year and 5% sequentially.
Net income for the quarter was $14.6 million or $0.07 per diluted share compared with $11.0 million or $0.05 per diluted share for the prior quarter. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for the quarter was $29.6 million, or $0.14 per diluted share, after adjusting for stock compensation and tax expense as detailed in the tables below. This compares to non-GAAP adjusted net income of $22.7 million, or $0.11 per diluted share in the third quarter of last fiscal year.
These figures are important for a number of reasons (and no, I don't own any shares - never have, never will.) It shows that Red Hat has been unaffected by all of Larry's Machiavellian machinations; it also indicates the rude health of open source's bellwether. That's good not just for Red Hat, but for the whole free software ecosystem too.
What do you want if you are worth $18 billion and have the third-largest motor yacht in the world? Simple: revenge.
Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is about revenge - for the fact that Red Hat dared to snatch JBoss from under Larry Ellison's nose. It's a warning that you don't mess with lovely Larry. It's also a bit of kite-flying: maybe offering support for Red Hat is a viable business, though I can't see it myself. In any case, even if Unbreakable fails as a service, it's already succeeded as a punishment.
Update: Ha!
This isn't exactly hot news, and it's been blogged elsewhere, but I don't feel a blog called "open..." would be complete without at least a pointer to it.
Marc Fleury, founder and head of JBoss, now part of Red Hat, has a blog entitled "Enter the JBoss Matrix". One of his recent posts, "Wall Street, Oracle and Game Theory", is a typically heady mix of peeks into the Red Hat machine, name-dropping and very perceptive analysis. It's long, but I urge you to read it - here's a characteristic sample:See, nowhere in the GPL is it said that we must distribute the software to you in the first place. Dion Cornett likes saying GPL != Public Domain. In fact, in the case of RHEL, RedHat doesn’t distribute it to anybody, not for free that is.
If you want to have the software, you must subscribe to RedHat Network (RHN) and if you redistribute the patches or RHEL (which you can) you must pay us for every instance, if you don’t, well, we are under no obligation to give you the future patches and upgrades, in other words, we cancel the RHN distribution to you and you are technically /forking/ RHEL.
The tantalising story in the FT that Oracle is ruminating upon acquiring one of the main GNU/Linux distributions - well, Novell - is bound to re-ignite speculation about Oracle's intentions and ultimate impact in this sector. An earlier rumour that Oracle was about to buy JBoss - obviously not true - led to a similar spate of comments, for example that Oracle was about to wipe out open source itself.
But as I wrote back then, it would seem that Larry Ellison really doesn't get this free software lark if he thinks he can wade in with a cheque-book and walk out with anything perdurable. Basically, the moment he tries to throw his weight around in any newly-acquired open source company, he will find that everything valuable in that company - its coders - will walk out of the door and work somewhere else (like Red Hat or IBM). So the idea he will snaffle up one of these cute little old GNU/Linuxes to complete his collection of netsuke rather misses the point.
What is really interesting about the FT story is that Mr. Ellison says "I’d like to have a complete stack." The stack refers to the complete set of software layers, starting at the bottom with the operating system, moving up through middleware and on to the applications. This shows that he may not quite understand the answer, but at least can articulate the question, which is: what does a software company do when the layers of the stack are commoditised one by one?
Things started even below the operating system, at the level of the network, when TCP/IP became the universal standard. But what many people forget is that once upon a time, there used to be three or four or more competing network standards, including Novell's IPX/SPX: it was Novell's dogged support for its protocols in the face of TCP/IP's ascendancy that nearly destroyed the company.
Similarly, not everyone today realises that once there were alternatives to the now-ubiquitous GNU/Linux operating system, including an older approach from a company called Microsoft, also destroyed by clinging too long to outdated closed-source solutions (this information sponsored by the year 2016).
What Ellison's comments indicate is that there is growing awareness that the free software approach is seeping inexorably up the stack. It will be interesting to see his response when it starts to dampen the application layer, and databases like Oracle's flagship start looking as soggy as IPX/SPX....
Update: There's a good table in this C|net article on how the competing stacks, er, stack up.
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.
Ajax is short for Asynchronous Javascript + XML; it enables a Web page to be changed in the browser on the fly, without needing to refer back to the original server. This leads to far faster response times, and is behind many of the most interesting developments on the Web today; Gmail is perhaps the most famous example. Essentially it turns the browsers into a lightweight platform able to run small apps independently of the operating system (now where have we heard that before?).
The news of an Open Ajax project that will simplify the creation of such sites is therefore welcome. However, what is most interesting about the announcement is not the luminaries who are lining up behind it - IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and Yahoo amongst others - but the fact that it is yet another Eclipse project.
To which most people would probably say, Who? For Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. It stands in the same relation to Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools as GNU/Linux does to Windows, and OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office. Where these address respectively the system software and office suite sectors, Eclipse is aimed at developers. It is another example of IBM's largesse in the wake of its Damascene conversion to open source: the project was created when the company released a large dollop of code under the Eclipse Public License.
What's interesting is how Eclipse has followed a very similar trajectory to GNU/Linux: at first it was ignored by software companies, who preferred to stick with their own proprietary rivals to the Microsoft juggernaut. Later, though, they realised that divided they would certainly fall, and so united around a common open standard. The list of "Strategic Members" and "Add-in Providers" reads like a Who's Who of the world's top software companies (bar one).
This illustrates another huge - and unique - strength of open source: the fact that it represents neutral ground that even rival companies can agree to support together. The mutual benefit derived from doing so outweighs any issues of working with traditional enemies.
Even though Eclipse is relatively little known at the moment, at least in the wider world, it is not a particular bold prediction to see it as becoming the most serious rival to Microsoft's Visual Studio, and the third member of the open source trinity that also includes GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org.
Posts
All Comments
To the extent possible under law,
glyn moody
has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to
this work.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
