The Open Road

Ubuntu has led the Linux community's efforts to improve on form, not simply function, and thereby make the Linux experience as good or better than Mac OS X in terms of usability. Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, the company set up to shepherd development and commercialization of Ubuntu, is the heart of that effort.

As announced on Thursday, however, Shuttleworth is resigning as Canonical CEO to focus on improving the Ubuntu user experience:

From March next year, I'll focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers. Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market.

Is this good or bad for Ubuntu? And what about Canonical?

Canonical is reportedly doing $30 million per year in sales, and is working on some significant projects that may establish it as the de facto Linux distribution for Netbooks, if it isn't already. (Ubuntu is arguably the community choice for personal computers.)

Even so, Linux still has a long way to go to match the user experience of Mac OS X, or even Windows. Shuttleworth has given me a sneak peak of his vision for where Ubuntu can go from a UI perspective.

I was blown away. This is a man who "gets it."

Even so, he and the Ubuntu community still have a ways to go to match Microsoft or Apple in user experience, and certainly in market share. To get there, Ubuntu needs Canonical, and Canonical needs Shuttleworth fixated on improving Ubuntu's user experience.

When I asked what his resignation as CEO means for Ubuntu, and his involvement with it, Shuttleworth responded:

I don't expect to be less visible, just have stronger management for the business units.

As reported by CNET and as reported on Canonical's corporate blog, Jane Silber, currently Canonical's COO, will replace Shuttleworth as CEO. A search for a new COO will commence in the first few months of 2010.

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment "doesn't mark a change of direction," perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

It's possible that the operations-minded Silber may channel Ubuntu's ambition into a few products where Ubuntu can dominate.

When I asked her for comment, Silber indicated that the move is more evolutionary than revolutionary:

This move should not be read as a precursor to a paring back in markets or as a dramatic shift in strategy. We continue to be committed to making Ubuntu the best possible platform, and to ensuring that Canonical provides high quality engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide....

I will still bring an operations discipline to company, but I will assume more responsibility and authority for the overall performance of the company including, I expect, greater participation in executive level sales and business development.

That involvement--i.e., working with customers and hearing them demand focus and discipline--may well prod Silber to instigate the changes she initially has disavowed.

Red Hat is instructive. Though many of us would like to see it broaden its focus, the company remains rooted in the enterprise server and middleware markets. Canonical, in my view, should take a lesson from Red Hat and channel some of its energy into fewer markets, markets where it can thrive.

Regardless of what happens, stay tuned to see how Shuttleworth's design aesthetic, now set to overdrive, can impact the cozy duopolies in "desktop" (Apple and Microsoft), servers (Red Hat and Microsoft), and more. With more time to focus on what customers and partners want, Canonical and Ubuntu may be set to take a more commanding position in the market.

Atlassian is one of those curiosities within the open-source world: like Apple, Atlassian doesn't tend to release its software as open source. But as with Apple, the open-source world loves to use its software.

From JIRA to Confluence and just about everything in between, Atlassian's software is broadly deployed within open source. Intriguingly, Atlassian turned back to that open-source community to integrate its own applications using OpenSocial, as I learned in an interview with Jay Simons, Atlassian's vice president of marketing.

Many people tend to think of OpenSocial as a way for Web sites like LinkedIn to share data with the Web, but Atlassian chose to use it to unify its applications behind the firewall. Why?
Simons: Roughly a year ago, Atlassian took a hard look at improving the integration between our eight products and upgrading the dashboard implementation of Jira, our popular issue tracker. Jira had a decent dashboard, and portlets based on our own technology that customers--and often some of our own engineers on different teams--sometimes struggled to use.

We had a choice: stick with what we have (slightly dated, but solid portlet technology), but make it bigger and better (engineers love this one, usually), or go open.

Asking seven independent teams to learn Jira's clunky portlet stack so they could integrate their products with Jira wasn't a popular option internally, and didn't really buy us much, so we intrinsically preferred the open option. There have been a few different standards for portlets over the years--JSR-168 and WSRP the most well known--but they all felt long-in-the-tooth. And then we took a close look at OpenSocial.

Many initially heard about OpenSocial a couple years ago, when it was billed as a Facebook killer--a shot fired by Google, echoed by the dozens of other consumer social networks scrambling to catch up to Facebook.

OpenSocial defines two concepts--an API for defining and working with social data (profiles, attributes, relationships) and specification for gadgets. OpenSocial's fundamental promise was interoperability--write an application once and host it in multiple social networks. Sound familiar? That's what we wanted to do with our own products.

A year later, and we've shipped OpenSocial in the guts of both Jira, our issue tracker, and Confluence, our enterprise wiki, thanks in large part to Apache Shindig, an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial container. Both Jira and Confluence are now OpenSocial gadget containers and producers, and the rest of our portfolio produce gadgets these two products can consume.

The benefits to Atlassian should be clear, but the benefits to our customers are also immediate: display build activity from the Bamboo build server, search results from the Confluence wiki, and recent commits to the SVN through Fisheye on a Jira dashboard that organizes that information alongside the issues and tasks related to an individual project. Everything a development team needs on a single page.

So OpenSocial wasn't a way for you to connect Jira with LinkedIn (or kill Facebook, for that matter)? What are the top-three reasons for choosing OpenSocial instead of some alternative integration technology?
Simons: One, it's open. OpenSocial's openness means it is consistently benefiting from the contributions of the community. Dozens of companies now are starting to work with it, from Atlassian to Google, and the spec is evolving quickly. Gadgets are an important ongoing part of Google's strategy across several products, so our customers benefit from Google's investments and innovations, as well as our own.

Two, easier for developers to grok. Writing portlets for Jira was an art form. Gadgets are far more pervasive, and the technology underpinning them--HTML and XML over HTTP--is the linqua franca of the Web. OpenSocial meant our products were immediately more accessible to more developers.

Three, instant interoperability. We not only got interoperability within our own portfolio, but with other OpenSocial gadget containers, like iGoogle and Gmail, and with hundreds of other OpenSocial gadgets, from Box.net to Remember The Milk.

What's next for OpenSocial?
Simons: The OpenSocial community is quite active. The Apache Shindig project is also quite active. The OpenSocial specification 1.0 (it's on v0.9 currently) should be released in January 2010.

What originated as a technology for consumer social networks, is quickly gaining traction amongst enterprise software vendors, and enterprises. We've created a site to explain how we use it, and hopefully we'll see more enterprises use it well beyond the consumer Web for which it was originally envisioned.

The more the merrier.

Despite all the handwringing about Microsoft's market clout in the European browser war, the real threat to Firefox may be Google, not Microsoft. Even as Microsoft's browser market share deflates to 64.36 percent, Google has upped its game with its increasingly extensible Chrome browser.

For those of us who cling to Mozilla Firefox because of its library of excellent add-ons and extensions, suddenly we have another viable, open-source choice.

Internet Explorer remains a viable threat to Firefox due to Microsoft's heft in operating systems, which helps to create enough inertia that most Windows users who start with IE simply never discover that they have browser alternatives.

But while IE plays catch-up to Firefox in sheer extendability and third-party innovation, the real contender could well be Google Chrome, which marries open source with a strong developer/extension story and bests just about everyone in performance.

I love Firefox, but mostly because I love the third-party innovation that Firefox enables. Add-ons like ForecastFox (in-browser weather updates), AdBlock Plus (blocking ads), and so on make my browsing experience awesome.

Such add-ons, however, tax the resources of my MacBook Pro. Considerably.

As I type this, I have 15 tabs open and have 22 add-ons installed. As a result, Firefox is eating up roughly 30 percent of my CPU, even beating resource hog Java.

That's a lot of juice to power my browser, even when considering that most of my work is done within the browser (from common browsing to Zimbra e-mail to Google search to...you name it).

According to TechCrunch, development of add-ons for Google Chrome is much easier than it is for Firefox, and those add-ons apparently no longer constrain Chrome's performance in the same way that Firefox add-ons do for Firefox.

If true, then Mozilla needs to be doing a lot more than simply opening up a Firefox add-on marketplace in 2010, as The Register reports it will. Instead, Firefox should be heads down on improving browser performance.

A marketplace makes sense for enriching the Firefox developer community and, hopefully, diversifying Mozilla's revenue sources so that it's not so heavily dependent on Google.

But given that Google Chrome's improved extensibility is aiming squarely at Firefox, Mozilla has more than a monetary problem. It has a serious competitive threat looming, one that will only be won by significantly improving performance while maintaining its excellent track record with developers.

I'm confident that the Firefox team can do it. I'm equally confident that it must. Yes, Mozilla marshals a more diverse and robust open-source community around Firefox than Google does for Chrome. But users arguably won't care.

The Google train is coming, and it's not going to stop...not even for a longtime ally like Firefox.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It's reasonably clear that open source is the heart of cloud computing, with open-source components adding up to equal cloud services like Amazon Web Services. What's not yet clear is how much the cloud will wear that open source on its sleeve, as it were.

Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into.

Or, rather, that customers stitch together their various cloud assets within Eucalyptus.

I caught up with Eucalyptus founder and Chief Technology Officer Rich Wolski to learn more about how Eucalyptus hopes to displace industry leaders like VMware, and the role that open source plays in growing the cloud-computing market.

While Wolski made a big deal about the company's open-source credentials, I found his argument about the open architecture of Eucalyptus more compelling:

[Eucalyptus] is architected to be compatible with such a wide variety of commonly installed data center technologies, [and hence] provides an easy and low-risk way of building private (i.e. on-premise or internal) clouds...

Thus data center operators choosing Eucalyptus are assured of compatibility with the emerging application development and operational cloud ecosystem while attaining the security and IT investment amortization levels they desire without the "fear" of being locked into a single public cloud platform.

... Read more

Initially, it appeared that every successful open-source company would be swallowed up through acquisition. That may still happen, but as the mergers and acquisitions route dries up, it's increasingly likely that the best open-source companies could find themselves growing toward an initial public offering.

After all, they may not have any other choice.

JBoss, Zimbra, XenSource, and other companies rode an initial surge in interest in open source as a business and development strategy, each selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Since that time the pace of acquisitions has slowed as would-be buyers hunker down and ride out the recession.

At the same time, open-source companies are reporting record revenue. My own company, Alfresco, has recorded 17 straight growth quarters since the company was founded in 2005, and we're joined by Funambol, Jaspersoft, and others that are reporting upward of 100 percent growth quarter over quarter.

Where does such sales momentum lead? Probably not to acquisitions. Not for many of these companies.

It's likely that within the next few years, the M&A market will open up again. But by that time many of these open-source companies will likely have attained a size that makes it easier for them to go public than to be acquired.

MySQL, which was topping $94 million in sales at the time of its $1 billion acquisition by Sun, is the exception to this rule. There simply aren't very many companies that can afford to spend $1 billion on an acquisition, which means that open-source companies will need to focus on being built to last, not built to flip.

Perhaps this won't sound appealing to the employees of Reductive Labs, Funambol, Pentaho, and other open-source companies. Like their Web 2.0 peers, they almost certainly would love to see a quick exit so that they can buy a cabin up in Tahoe.

But though it may not be ideal for such employees, it's arguably a very good thing for the industry, and for IT buyers. The industry could use another Red Hat. IT buyers, for their parts, would probably love to be able to buy from someone other than Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

So settle in for the mid-term march to profitable $100 million open-source companies. At current growth rates, we should start to see IPO action as early as 2012, and perhaps sooner.

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See John Mark Walker's bio below.

Quick, what were you doing on December 9, 1999? If you actually remember, then there's a good chance that you're an old-school Linux type. If you don't have any idea, then read on, and you'll discover what you missed.

I'll never forget where I was--at ground zero of the apex of dot-com ridiculousness. While I and all of my co-workers were in the office that day, about the only thing we accomplished was writing 15 gazillion Perl-based variations on the theme of stock tickers that displayed the price of LNUX, updated at regular intervals. Well, that and drinking champagne. Words cannot adequately express what it's like to look around the office and know that everyone in the building is a newly minted millionaire--on paper, at least.

Ten years ago today, shares of LNUX, the Nasdaq symbol for VA Linux Systems, went on sale to the eagerly awaiting public. You may recall that VA Linux Systems was the company that combined Linux, open-source software, and Intel-based hardware. Just six months prior to VA's initial public offering, Red Hat Software had gone public with a very successful IPO.

We were in the middle of the open-source pixie dust revolution, when many flagging companies jumped on the open-source bandwagon in a desperate attempt to recapture past magic. It was this phenomenon that led to the general conflation of the late-1990s open-source boom with the dot-com bubble, and it would be a few years before most industry analysts, pundits, and beat reporters figured out that there was a difference.

But back to IPO day. I strolled into work sometime after 9:30 that morning and was immediately greeted by Pay, my manager, with some astounding news. We all guessed that the day would be significant, but none of us were prepared for the tsunami of blissful, surreal numbness rushing to greet us.

He showed me a sheet of paper faxed that morning from the investment bank's office (truly ground zero on that day), that was copied ad nauseum and shoved into disbelieving faces. I'll never forget what was on it: just a simple table with 2 columns. The column on the left was a list of investors, and the column on the right was the price they bid for our stock. The numbers were astronomical: $320, $250, $200, $300, $290.

Curiously, some investor didn't get the memo and bid a paltry $50. We laughed at that because it was really funny--at the time. A year later, and I would recall that lone investor for an entirely different reason: on December 8, 2000, LNUX closed the day at $8.49.

On IPO day, we could all do the math, and on that day, the math was in our favor. The official IPO price was $30, and most of us owned options on shares with a much lower strike price. We had all won the lottery, hit the jackpot, (insert gambling metaphor here). Or so we thought. What actually happened was, as Don Marti so artfully described it, we had all become players in a game none of us truly understood.

To this day, the VA Linux IPO remains the Nasdaq's most successful, in terms of its first-day gain, but what does that success really mean, in the context of events that have taken place since? At the time, the LNUX IPO was lumped in with the rest of dot-com mania and treated as the poster child for the insanity that gripped the market.

The New York Times summed up that view best with its report on the IPO, "A Tiny Company with Dim Prospects Goes Public with a Bang." (Note: the Times has since changed the headline, but we remember the original.)

You'll be unsurprised to know that we viewed things slightly differently. But as the stock price plummeted, we went from a sign of the audacity of the times to a symbol of wasted effort, a gloomy future, and everything that was wrong with the go-go '90s. We were somehow expected to repent for the misdeeds of others.

It is simply wrong to view VA Linux as a dot-com vehicle or to attach a greater symbolism to its downfall. It was really neither; it was simply the dramatic rise and fall of a company that overreached. It was a real company that made real things and believed very strongly that open source was going to be a major component of IT very soon.

That we executed poorly and paid dearly for it does not diminish the original ideas behind the company. While VA was not profitable after the IPO, it was certainly not because of revenue. In fact, revenue growth was strong, but our unrealistic growth plan--to become Dell in less than two years--did us in. Only the convenience of timing allows VA Linux Systems to be mentioned in the same breath as eToys, Pets.com or Webvan. The revenue of those was rather paltry, in comparison.

To put the VA Linux IPO in its proper context, let's rewind and remember what was going on at the time:

• Red Hat had a great IPO the summer of 1999.
• IBM had jumped into bed with Apache and had started its first big push with Linux.
• Oracle and most other major database players had released native versions for Linux.
• A year earlier, Dan Kusnetzky famously authored the famous IDC report showing explosive Linux growth of 212 percent.

And yet, in spite of these obvious signs of traction and increasing market share with real customer demand, Linux and the rest of the open-source "bandwagon" were treated like Summer of Love refuse that had never really come down from the acid hits.

Every article about Linux included (stupid, irrelevant) questions about whether it would replace Windows 98. There was a widespread belief among industry observers that open source was fueled by the dot-com bubble and would wither away when the bubble burst. Every article referenced a ragged band of hippie programmers who did it out of love or ideology and just wanted to beat the evil empire.

At that time, no one had really figured out what was driving open-source development. It's worth pointing out that we card-carrying members of "the" open-source community played our part in that perception. Who can forget the famous Windows Refund Day? And if you never smelled Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond at a conference, then you clearly missed out.

It was a heady time of uncertainty, doubt, and eternal optimism. A time of green-field bliss, of "Linux without limits," and there was no problem that a few lines of Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) couldn't solve. After all, "the geek shall inherit the earth." It must be true; I read it on a T-shirt.

It truly was a time of the almighty individual weaving his magic and changing the world--and if you were lucky, getting paid well for it. We were young and naive, and those of us endowed with Y chromosomes were high on testosterone. We truly believed that we were on the right side of history but were too stupid to realize our own limitations. This was a blessing and a curse.

That unyielding belief in the omnipotence of writing code gave our army the energy to slay dragons we wouldn't have otherwise, but it also gave us the chutzpah to tackle issues that we ultimately could not solve. Case in point: that time when someone who shall remain anonymous tried to rewrite our ERP system from scratch. In Perl. He didn't last very long.

As it turns out, we were right about the open-source thing, but we somehow forgot the other history lesson: the one about how being on the leading edge of something successful doesn't mean you'll enjoy all, most, or indeed, any success. Those who ultimately reaped the benefits of open-source proliferation did so because they were smarter and took a more conservative approach.

The 10th anniversary of Red Hat's IPO passed without much fanfare last summer, probably because its management is too busy running a successful company to really take the time to pause and reflect. VA Linux Systems, meanwhile, was devastated by the tech bust because those start-up companies were a significant percentage or our revenue.

VA Linux Ssytems changed its name in 2001 to VA Software, after jettisoning the hardware business entirely, and it focused on selling licenses for SourceForge Enterprise. And when that didn't work out, it became SourceForge, a collection of Web sites deriving revenue entirely from ad sales. And it has since changed its name again, to Geeknet.

For the veterans of the VA Linux IPO, we're left to ponder what might have been and savor the unreal moments, while deriving some small consolation from the fact that our instincts were right: open source was not a fad; it was just the beginning. It's not going away, and VA Linux was ahead of its time. Small consolation, indeed.

Google Android adoption--both that which is publicly announced and that which is still under wraps--is amazing. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declared that Android adoption is set to "explode." This is good news for Google, of course, as well as the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers that support Android.

It's also extremely good news for Funambol, the open-source mobile cloud sync company.

Even as the mobile telcos seek winning alternatives to the controlling grasp of Apple, that same industry is simultaneously enthusiastic and leery about Google: enthusiastic about the operating system, but leery about tying all of their customer data into Google's cloud services.

Enter Funambol, the open-source mobile cloud sync and push e-mail.

Funambol ensures mobile operators maintain control over customer data, rather than sacrificing it to Google. E-mail, social networking features, contact information, etc.: Funambol can sync it all, with the mobile operator and its end-customers retaining ownership.

The fact that Funambol is open source doesn't hurt. Not only does it nicely complement Google's open-source Android strategy, it allows mobile operators, handset manufacturers, software vendors, and others to tailor Funambol's Java software to suit their particular needs.

Small wonder, then, that ten of the top mobile companies use Funambol, a list that includes companies readers of this blog use every day...in just about any developed nation (and others beyond). Such customer traction is translating into greater than 100-percent sales growth every quarter.

Recession? What recession?

In fact, as Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me on Wednesday, it is the recession that has accelerated Android adoption and, by extension, Funambol's adoption. Mobile operators don't want to pay hefty royalties for Windows Mobile and need software that sets them apart in a crowded, competitive market.

If this sounds like a perfect storm for open-source Android, that's because it is. But it's also creating an exceptional opportunity for Funambol, and could well establish beachheads for a range of other open-source products that sit within the Android ecosystem.

Despite the broad and deep trend toward open-source software, it's telling that Red Hat remains the only large, pure-play open-source vendor.

Without a strong, standalone open-source leader, will commercial open source endure?

The obvious answer is yes, but there are reasons to think that the industry would benefit from a billion-dollar open-source company. Actually, several.

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that open source, which by its very nature tends to be decentralized and bottom-up in its growth, would benefit by concentrating wealth in a few hegemons.

David is nice, but the fact is that Goliath generally wins.

Take baseball, for example. The New York Times on Monday reported on the importance of the spending power of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox to the overall strength of the American League. A rising tide may raise all boats. But in the case of baseball, a few dominant teams force the rest of the league to follow suit or die, a curse/blessing that the National League doesn't share.

The stronger Red Hat is, by analogy, the better-positioned it is to set the pace of spending and innovation for other open-source companies.

The same is true in football, i.e. soccer. "Soccernomics" traces the importance of the Manchester Uniteds, Arsenals, and Real Madrids for pulling in fans: fans flock to watch the big teams, either to cheer for them or against them. The prospect of cheering on Hull City to best Bolton simply isn't that appealing.

In a similar manner, Red Hat serves as a beacon for would-be open source buyers. It may be hard to get excited about buying into No-Name Open-Source Vendor X, but buying from an established brand-name vendor like Red Hat? Much more appealing.

The problem, however, is that Red Hat is still a minnow in the global software pool, and its fixed focus on baseline infrastructure leaves it ill-equipped to lead the open-source market. Most open-source start-ups simply don't need Red Hat to thrive, and they derive little value from a partnership with the company.

A lot of companies make money in the shadow of Microsoft. Not so in Red Hat's.

Nor is Red Hat a viable exit for most open-source companies. Google, IBM, and others actively contribute to open-source projects--and arguably contribute even more to the continued health of the commercial open-source ecosystem by offering healthy exits for open-source start-ups.

Tim O'Reilly called out this phenomenon years ago when he suggested that the likely exit for most open-source companies would be acquisitions by proprietary software vendors. This is good for the open-source companies, but it may not be good for open source.

It would be ideal to have a large open-source applications vendor, but it's unlikely we'll get one anytime soon, particularly since successful open-source companies keep getting swallowed by proprietary vendors before they can crack the $100 million mark, much less than $1 billion mark.

It's also possible that we don't need IBM-sized, pure-play open-source companies. After all, we have IBM and its ilk already funding open source.

It's equally likely that getting to such a size with a pure-play open-source model simply isn't possible.

But I think we need a few open-source hegemons, companies that can offer a clear alternative to Oracle and Microsoft for both buyers looking for open-source software solutions and vendors looking for open-source software partners. Such hegemons can also help to fund the growth of the next generation of open-source innovation.

But from where will they come? I'm not sure. Your thoughts, please.

The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.

Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?

Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a significant amount of money" in the open-source database vendor, EnterpriseDB. As he told me:

This is a great step forward for our company and for Postgres. Red Hat has done heroic work bringing commercial open source to mainstream enterprise adoption. And it's making a difference: arguably billions of dollars of spend in operating system and middleware has gone back to customers. You want to talk about returning control to users? That's the real yardstick. That's real disruption.

For EnterpriseDB to have the trust and support of Red Hat as a partner and investor is a huge help to our company and I think it gives another strong indication to enterprise customers challenging their old spending habits, that there is more they can do.

It's important to note that Red Hat has been distributing Postgres for some time. It's in every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that Red Hat ships. As such, it's already in the hands of thousands of Red Hat customers and users, and is in heavy demand in some geographies, particularly Latin America. But until now Red Hat has not provided robust support for the database on par with its support for Linux and JBoss.

That's about to change.

The change is good for Red Hat customers, but this isn't the only area in which Red Hat has been seeking to expand its influence. Red Hat has been actively looking for opportunities to invest in a variety of open-source companies, most recently investing in JasperSoft.

Red Hat, once content to go its own way in the software industry, is increasingly concerned with ensuring the vitality of its peers. After all, if Red Hat remains the only sizable open-source vendor, that's an indication of the weakness of the model, not its strength.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, however, nicely marries pragmatism with idealism, as suggested by his comments on EnterpriseDB's subscription model:"EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model. Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial."

He's right, but it's interesting to hear him laud a model (i.e., a subscription to proprietary and open-source software, plus maintenance and support) from which he distanced Red Hat in Red Hat's Q1 earnings call. ("I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business then what we're doing.")

He's right the second time (in the EnterpriseDB news release). They are not fundamentally different business models. I suspect his comments on the earnings call reflected an attempt to get out of an inaccurate and misleading question from the ever-entertaining Trip Chowdhry.

Regardless, Red Hat's investment in Postgres vendor EnterpriseDB suggests that it, along with IBM and others, is prepared to bolster alternatives to MySQL in its larger quest to provide real competition in the database industry.

To be fair, Red Hat's interest in Postgres and EnterpriseDB precedes the EU's intervention in Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL. The interest is understandable: Postgres is a great choice for a wide variety of database workloads. It's built for transactions and higher-end use cases, like the Oracle and IBM database workloads that it can replace (or augment).

EnterpriseDB plays into Red Hat's overarching strategy of commoditizing key infrastructure, as Whitehurst has noted. Given that the $20 billion database market is concentrated in just three vendors who control 85 percent of the market, databases are ripe for disruption, disruption that Red Hat can feed from a distance.

Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB says more about Red Hat's increasing awareness of its larger role in the open-source ecosystem than it does of any competition with MySQL. It's about time.