It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.
Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?
In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed to build a vibrant business, doing north of $90 million at the time of its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008.
Equally compelling, however, is the exceptional user and developer community that formed around the open-source database project, registering tens of millions of downloads and a massive developer community.
This community augmented MySQL's financial fortunes, of course, but it also protected MySQL database users from the whims of the company, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos wrote to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes:
Even if Oracle for whatever reason would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity - not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Unfortunately, the EC seems intent on punishing MySQL--both community and company--for its success. Already the MySQL database project has started to fracture into competing forks, while business rivals like EnterpriseDB and IBM collect confused customers.
More worryingly, the EC's actions may end up diminishing potential returns to investors in other open-source projects, particularly those that take the added time and cost to build global communities.
Technology mergers and acquisitions activity is at a 20-month high. Open-source companies, however, may miss out on this resurgence, particularly those, like Acquia and EnterpriseDB, that build on successful open-source communities (Drupal and Postgres, respectively).
Indeed, based on the EC's actions, perhaps the worst thing these companies could do is foster successful open-source communities. Maybe they should just take the cash and run?
Consider: the EC didn't challenge Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra, VMware's acquisition of SpringSource, Citrix's acquisition of XenSource, etc. What do they have in common? Rising revenue but, except in the case of SpringSource, much more limited communities than MySQL. (Even the Spring community pales in comparison to MySQL, impressive though it is.)
Granted, the major difference with Oracle/MySQL is that the two are ostensibly competitors, as CNET points out. In the letter referenced above, however, Mickos dismisses such competition. The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
Regardless, as well as MySQL was doing, $90-plus million is spare change in the global database market. The EC, in other words, isn't trying to protect MySQL's business. It's trying to protect MySQL's community.
Such mollycoddling of an open-source community is destructive to all future investments in similar endeavors. Why should commercial entities bother fostering community--the very community that makes them less susceptible to hostile takeover and anticompetitive forces--if doing so simply ends up ruining financial returns?
The EC means well, but it is not doing the right thing for MySQL, its community, or other open-source commercial efforts. Quite the opposite. Just as the commercial open-source community has been pondering a move back to community-controlled open source, the EC threatens to hobble the shift.
The EC may well end up with less competition, not more, by blocking Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun and its crown jewel, MySQL.
Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .Net applications.
The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing, and virtualization.
One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .Net-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial support for Mono means Suse Linux Enterprise 11 users can migrate their existing .Net applications across to the Linux platform.
"We have an online tool for customers to test their .Net applications and see if they run on Mono," Dyroff told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. Microsoft's rich Web media technology, Silverlight, is now also supported with the inclusion of Moonlight, the Mono project's open-source alternative to Silverlight.
Novell has overseen Mono since it bought the developer Ximian in 2003. Asked why it took so long for Novell to provide commercial support for the project, Dyroff said it had in fact provided commercial support to some customers for a while, as part of Novell's consulting work.
"We needed to be convinced that Mono was completely enterprise-ready," Dyroff said, adding that Novell also had to be sure it could provide full support for the product. "The feature set is now rich enough to run most of those .Net applications--the success rate is now above 50 percent without changes, which is a big step forward for our Mono offering. It is important that, when we make a certain promise to the customers, we need to be knowledgeable enough and sure it's really going to run."
The Mono extension is joined in the new version of the platform by the High Availability Extension, a clustering product that will, according to Dyroff, "allow customers to run their mission-critical workload in a high-availability clustered way." The benefit of this feature for Novell, he said, was that it would allow the company to further tempt the Unix market to migrate to Linux.
"Customers running (Unix platforms such as) Solaris have told us they would turn away from that Unix platform if they had a high-performance, feature-rich high-availability offering in the Suse Linux portfolio," Dyroff said. "Unix-to-Linux migration still (brings) the most common new customers into the Linux platform."
Dyroff said IBM's rumored desire to buy Sun had been helpful for Novell, by making Sun's customers wonder "what will happen in the future with the Solaris platform, the Sparc processor and so on."
Collaborating with Microsoft
Asked whether Novell's close collaboration with Microsoft weakened Suse's position as a challenger to Windows, Dyroff claimed such co-operation made it easier for customers to adopt Linux.
"I do think that the collaboration we're having on a technical level does not in any way influence the competition we are experiencing on a business level," Dyroff said. "We are fighting hard. We are working with customers and (independent software vendors) to put (products) together that attack areas which are Microsoft strongholds."
"Customers have a need to run Microsoft Windows and Suse Linux Enterprise or other Linux offerings side by side," Dyroff said. "Therefore, that technical collaboration is important to be able to do seamless migration and integration, and compete on a value level rather than disappointing the customer."
Novell said in a statement Tuesday that Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is optimized to run at "near-native" performance on major hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Xen--the new Xen 3.3 hypervisor is included in Novell's new distribution.
The distribution will also be certified and supported for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), making it possible to run Suse-based virtual machines in the cloud.
Novell has also released ZenWorks Linux Management 7.3, a management tool for desktop and server systems. This, along with Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11, Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 and the Mono Extension, is available now.
The High Availability extension will be released in the second quarter of this year.
Novell also announced Suse Linux Enterprise JeOS ("just enough operating system") on Tuesday, along with a set of tools that it said will allow independent software vendors to "assemble a virtual appliance with just the pieces of Suse Linux Enterprise necessary to support their specific application." That product will become available in April.
The company also said that later this year it will release updates for Suse Linux Enterprise Point of Service, Suse Linux Enterprise Real Time Extension and Suse Linux Enterprise Thin Client.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
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Novell and VMware have teamed up to work with software makers to develop virtual appliances based on Suse Linux Enterprise, the companies announced at the VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes.
As part of the agreement, independent software vendors using VMware Studio to create virtual appliances for VMware's ESX hypervisor are being offered a "free evaluation redistribution of appliances" built on the Suse Linux Enterprise operating system, Novell and VMware said in a statement Tuesday.
In addition, the partners are helping third-party vendors to build Suse Linux Enterprise-based virtual appliances under the VMware Ready scheme, aimed at spurring the creation of VMware-friendly virtual appliances that can be put to use with little installation and configuration.
Novell and VMware also announced another collaboration agreement Tuesday. Novell said its Suse Linux Enterprise Server will also become a "fully-supported and optimized" guest operating system for VMware's ESX virtualization platform.
VMware's vice president of alliances, Parag Patel, said in the statement that the companies expected their collaboration to "yield increasing value...as more and more customers seek to achieve full virtualization, including mission-critical applications such as SAP".
The extension of the alliance between VMware and Novell follows announcements of collaborative moves as companies try to position themselves in the growing virtualization market. Last week, Microsoft and Red Hat said they intend to make sure their separate virtualization software products will work smoothly together, while VMware on Tuesday announced a new client hypervisor collaboration with Intel. VMware is the leader in the global virtualization market.
Novell and VMware also announced at VMworld that on March 18, they will launch a further collaboration with SAP to help the enterprise software company's customers migrate from Unix to VMware-virtualized Suse Linux Enterprise.
Also on Tuesday, VMware and Fujitsu Siemens said they are teaming up to offer a new version of FlexFrame for SAP. The product integrates VMware Infrastructure physical and virtual data center infrastructure, virtualized network and storage components and "comprehensive services" into one package. FlexFrame for SAP, which is available immediately, provides various quality-of-service features. These include a tool to monitor SAP application components and another to automatically restart applications on any available virtual or physical system if there is a hardware failure.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
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