The Open Road

Red Hat is generally credited as the industry's leading open-source company, but it's a distinction that is as meaningless as it is incorrect. While Red Hat's revenue directly derives from the open-source software it develops and distributes, other companies like Sun, IBM, and Google actually write and contribute far more open-source code. It may be time to stop talking about open-source companies and get back to the importance of open-source code.

Open source is increasingly the foundation upon which software and Web companies depend. MySpace made waves on Tuesday by open sourcing Qizmt, a distributed computation framework (running on Windows Server, intriguingly) that currently powers MySpace's "People you may know" feature. But MySpace, as VentureBeat notes, was simply playing catch-up to Facebook's recent open sourcing of Tornado.

Neither move is an attempt to score brownie points with the "in" crowd. Both moves are motivated by self-interest, self-interest that increasingly requires inviting developer communities to embrace and extend one's Web services/software through open source.

It's also a way to improve software quality. By embracing open-source projects as a foundation for a company's software, and then extending it through its own open-source projects, the collective quality of open source is strong and growing, as Accenture's Kit Plummer notes.

It's this enlightened self-interest and the quality is engenders that has turned open source into essential infrastructure for virtually all commercial software, and which means Red Hat and other pure-play open-source companies are no longer the center of the open-source universe.

The Linux kernel is comprised of 11.5 million lines of code, of which Red Hat is responsible for roughly 12 percent (measured in terms of lines of code changed). Even if we add in JBoss Application Server (another 2 million lines of code or so) and other Red Hat projects, we're still left with far less open-source code from Red Hat than from others.

Take Sun, for example. Sun is the primary developer behind Java (more than 6.5 million lines of code), Solaris (over 2 million lines of code), OpenOffice (approximately 10 million lines of code), and other open-source projects.

Or IBM, with 12.5 million lines of code contributed to Eclipse alone, not to mention Linux (6.3 percent of total contributions), Geronimo, and a wide variety of other open-source projects.

Google, however, is the most interesting company of all, as it's not a software company, per se. I asked Chris DiBona, Google's open source and public sector program manager, about Google's open-source contributions. His response:

Conservatively, we've released about 14 million lines of code. Android tops 10 million lines of code, and then you have Chrome (2 million lines of code), GWT (300,000 lines of code), and about a project released every week over the last five years. Then you have a couple hundred Googlers patching on a weekly or monthly basis.

While DiBona was quick to suggest that Google doesn't claim the crown for Open Source Top Contributor ("We'd say we're 'among' the largest [contributors]"), it almost certainly is the world's largest open-source code contributor, especially when one considers its other open-source activities, including hosting perhaps the world's largest repository for open-source projects, with more than 250,000 hosted projects, at least 40,000 of which are actively contributed, not to mention its Summer of Code. After all, lines of code, while useful, is not necessarily the best measure of the value of open-source contributions.

In fact, Patrick Finch of the Mozilla Foundation speculates that Google's best open-source contribution may have nothing to do with writing new code at all:

Google's biggest contribution to open source is arguably not code, but proving that you can scale Linux on whitebox hardware.

It's a great point, and one that underscores the fact that the "open-source company" distinction is somewhat useless. Google doesn't call itself an open-source company, and rightly so. Open source is simply part of its strategy for distributing software that will help it sell more advertising.

Sun attempted to turn itself into an open-source company, but once Oracle completes its acquisition of Sun, Oracle certainly won't take on that label. Not because it's a bad label, but because it's simply not a useful one anymore.

We are all open-source companies now. Which also means that none of us are. Open source is simply a way that we enable some aspect of our businesses, whether we're Red Hat or Microsoft or Google or Facebook.

And given that Web companies like Google don't need to directly monetize open source, we may actually see far more open-source code emerge from these Web companies than we ever have or ever will from traditional "open-source software companies" like Red Hat, MySQL, or Pentaho.

I've been writing a lot lately about SpringSource, largely because it has demonstrated a big vision (nothing less than the redefinition of the application server and an end-to-end application story), and so I wasn't terribly surprised today to see VMware buy SpringSource for $420 million. On roughly $20 million in sales, much of that services, it's a rich valuation, but one that is absolutely deserved given SpringSource's potential.

In fact, it's almost certain that SpringSource sold too early, at least as measured the size of potential exits it could have had given a bit more time. Like Zimbra before it, SpringSource had unbounded potential to shake up the application server and development market.

I remember talking to Peter Fenton, partner with Benchmark Capital and an investor in both SpringSource and Zimbra. He indicated that the firm had made tremendous efforts to keep Zimbra from selling to Yahoo as it still had so much potential to build toward an even bigger valuation.

Happy as Fenton is with the SpringSource acquisition, I wonder if he feels the same as he did about Zimbra. So much money left on the table.

Indeed, I found out about the SpringSource acquisition back in July, apparently even before formal discussions started between the companies (due to a leaky source at VMware). SpringSource CEO Rob Bearden denied the existence of acquisition discussions between the two companies and Rod Johnson, the company's founder and CEO, was on vacation at the time.

But in denying the rumors, Bearden, COO at SpringSource, suggested that given "one more year...(SpringSource) will be bigger than MySQL," acquired by Sun for $1 billion.

I think Bearden was right. The company's valuation has been soaring due to efficiently run operations (Bearden) and a big vision for the company's prospects (Johnson and others). It was only a matter of time before it IPO'd or was acquired.

I had hoped, however, that Red Hat would complement its JBoss business with SpringSource, but it's not to be, and this doesn't bode well for Red Hat, on two counts.

First, with every acquisition of a leading open-source company by anyone other than Red Hat, Red Hat becomes more and more isolated. Other companies are integrating open source into their business strategies. Red Hat's differentiation as "the" open source company doesn't have much of a shelf life left.

Second, SpringSource's ubiquitous Spring Framework already threatened Red Hat's booming JBoss business. But add VMware's leading virtualization technology and suddenly Red Hat is under siege by a highly credible and disruptive competitor that could well outflank it.

Johnson describes the offering:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a platform as a service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

Here's what it looks like:

Astute observers will notice that the operating system, Red Hat's core competence, becomes increasingly less relevant in this world. Vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and others have less to fear from this threat, because they're already building high-value solutions above the operating system.

Red Hat doesn't. Red Hat is exposed by this VMware and SpringSource combination. It needs to become more aggressive.

Red Hat is, of course, taking a leadership role in virtualization and increasingly cloud computing. But it will need to quickly move beyond its dependence on its operating system business to sell a larger, strategic story or it faces the prospect of being an excellent, limited basic infrastructure vendor.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

All the hipsters in Silicon Valley talk about PHP, Twitter, and Web 2.0. But recent surveys show that kids can't be bothered to use Twitter.

Meanwhile, COBOL, one of the industry's oldest programming languages, still "equates to 80 percent of the world's actively used code," according to Stephen Kelley of Micro Focus.

COBOL? Really?

Yes, really. COBOL keeps chugging because, as John Willis suggests, it continues to power the boring (but essential) software like CICS (Customer Information Control System). Not very sexy, but when you think about life for more than a nanosecond, most of what makes life work is the transportation, finance, health care, etc. systems that don't make waves but do make our lives more efficient.

This is why the hot jobs in the cold economy center on "old" programming languages like Java and .Net. They're not cool. They're essential.

I've grown to love Twitter, but I'm not waiting for it to change the world. My demographic (25- to 45-year-olds working in technology) believes it's changing the world, starting with the ushering in of a new age of Iranian democracy. But as Foreign Policy points out, Twitter does as much to help crush dissidents and spread misinformation as it helps to remedy things.

In other words, it's really no different from the old technology, except that it does a better job getting into the news.

In sum, forget the hype. While we think technology runs at breakneck speed, the reality is that technology adoption does not. It's simply impossible, especially for enterprises, to adopt new technology at the pace at which it is developed and released.

This is why, for example, companies pay Red Hat to make Linux move more slowly with an 18-month release schedule. Innovation is great, but many enterprises prefer to get innovation on the drip.

Even when people, usually consumers, do quickly adopt technology, this is often a sign that it will be dropped quickly, too. Consider MySpace. Once on top of the world, it's now hemorrhaging market share to Facebook, which in turn will likely evaporate in the face of The Next Big Thing.

I suspect that the longer the adoption period for technology, the longer it tends to stick around. If I invest a lot of time and money in an IT purchase, I'm less likely to drop it quickly.

I'm not suggesting that Web scripting languages like PHP aren't big, or that Twitter is irrelevant. I'm just saying that the reality of what sells today is often very different from what gets funded today in Silicon Valley.

Linux is now old hat and safe, which is precisely why the value of Linux skills has risen 50 percent in the job market. The same holds true for open source, generally: now that it's old hat, enterprises can't adopt it fast enough.

If you're looking for funding from customers rather than from VCs, you might want to consider that boring, old technology that keeps the lights on but doesn't light up the sky.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Some argue that open-source software can't innovate. In fact, one of the industry's former executives, Peter Yared, recently argued that "the only successful open-source companies sell commodities."

Yared clearly hasn't heard of SpringSource, an open-source application platform provider that is redefining the J2EE application server and, quite possibly, the future of open source.

Yared isn't alone in his beliefs. A friend recently wrote me to suggest that open source is at its best when disrupting big, profitable markets:

Commercial open source is a (commodity) replacement market. When it is not (i.e., people are building new, never-done-before cool/future-proof apps with open-source technology), then it is a pure-play Internet-based business model, one that is becoming so specific/demanding that people will want full control and (to) develop their own stuff, e.g., Google, Facebook, and others that heavily use open source to build their Web services.

SpringSource and its ubiquitous Spring Framework, however, promise something different. Something much more ambitious. Not only does Spring challenge the status quo in application development, deployment, and management (Hyperic), but SpringSource is proving that commercial open source can peacefully coexist with community involvement.

In a conversation with Spring creator and SpringSource founder Rod Johnson, he clarified SpringSource's competitive differentiation:

The essence of SpringSource is that we're not a commodity play but have a far more ambitious agenda. We're not interested in replicating what closed-source vendors already offer, at lower price: We are providing a superior experience to developers and operations teams--for example, in our integrated approach to unifying the application life cycle from developer desktop to the data center--which doesn't presently exist in Java.

Of course, our offerings are also leaner (more productive and faster), cheaper and more open than those of the old incumbents, and that's a huge selling point in today's market. But we're focused on being the enterprise Java leader--and not merely in open source.

SpringSource isn't simply replacing IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, or Red Hat JBoss application servers. It is actually doing much more, and it offers, in my opinion, the best example of just how disruptive an open-source vendor can be precisely because SpringSource isn't seeking to be the open-source leader in Java, but the leader, period.

Gartner estimates that there are currently at least 2 million Spring developers, an impressive number suggesting that the Java community is looking to Spring to help it migrate Java applications onto lighter-weight containers (Tc Server), across highly virtualized environments, and ultimately to the cloud. Given SpringSource's strong financial performance, the company seems to be doing a good job of monetizing a significant percentage of that Spring adoption.

After meeting with the SpringSource executive team at its San Mateo, Calif., offices a few weeks ago to discuss its strategy, I'm convinced that the company is on track to improve that percentage significantly too.

We're at the point when it's not enough to be "the Red Hat of (CRM, ECM, ERP, etc.)." In a bad economy that sees open-source solutions adopted at an ever-increasing pace, now growing at a 22 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate), according to IDC, it's time for open-source vendors to lead and develop markets, not simply follow in the wake of established proprietary vendors, picking up their crumbs.

SpringSource is demonstrating how it can be done. It's an aggressive company with the finances, management, and product ambition to become a very big player in enterprise IT within just a few short years. It's a company that Microsoft should fear and that Oracle or IBM should buy.

Of course, SpringSource being SpringSource, it might actually be planning to buy Oracle or IBM instead.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

If you're part of the "cool kid" developer crowd, you're undoubtedly writing your new application with Ruby on Rails, and spend a lot of time talking about Git, Squeak, or Memcached.

But if you want a job, apparently you should get back to ancient technologies like Java and .Net, according to new data from IT employment company Dice.com, cited in Baseline magazine. In addition to those programming heavyweights, other enterprise bellwethers like Oracle, SharePoint, and SAP also make the cut.

On Java, Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.com, sees value in formal training, per Baseline's account:

Online developers with proficiency in Java, particularly with J2EE, can still find good prospects within the market. Experience is valued, but Silver suggests that Sun's Certified Java programmer (SCJP) offers a leg up on the competition.

Certification? That's about as Old World as you can find. And yet it seems to work.

Apparently, new-age Web technologies will get you a date, but old-school technologies are the best bet if you want a job.

And with TechServe Alliance finding 16,000 IT jobs lost in June 2009, and new Janco Associates data (via Baseline) reporting an overall IT salary decline of 0.19 percent, but a 0.22 percent increase in enterprise IT salaries, it may be time to double down on those "boring" old enterprise technologies.

Employment is pretty sexy, even if Java and .Net are not.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The big news coming out of Sun's JavaOne conference this week is that Sun (soon-to-be Oracle) is trying to outbid Microsoft as the world's biggest photocopier company. ("Redmond, start your photocopiers.")

No, Sun isn't actually building photocopiers but, like Symbian, Microsoft, and others, it is playing catch-up to Apple's App Store with its new Java Store, as The Register reports. The store is intended to be a central repository for Java and JavaFX applications, but it's unclear how it will distinguish itself.

As a consumer, I don't care if an application is built in Java. I just want to know whether it's any good, and whether it will run on my iPhone (Blackberry/Palm Pre/whatever). The Java brand matters to developers--it doesn't matter at all to end users.

Not to be outdone in imitation, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used JavaOne to reassure Java devotees that Oracle's commitment to Java is strong and to drop a hint that Oracle/Sun may get into Netbooks, those ubertrendy devices that everyone is talking about but few are actually using.

Back to the App Store. Or, rather, app stores....

Sun isn't alone in copycat tactics. Nokia is also getting into the App Store clone wars, and Symbian has its own planned app store. Google launched its Android Market, and Microsoft, photocopiers at the ready, is beefing up its Windows Marketplace.

Pretty soon, consumers will have scads of choices of where to buy their applications...and so won't have a clue as to where to buy them.

It's not that application stores are a bad idea. It's just that it's not clear that we need a myriad of them, or that vendors will get the mileage from them that they expect, as Joel West points out.

Google Wave showed the industry that innovation is still possible, but requires vendors to discard existing paradigms for what is possible and how to deliver software.

In a similar fashion, platform vendors need to figure out novel ways to emulate the best of what Apple has delivered in its App Store, but reinvent the concept for their own customers. We don't need App Store clones. We need new ways of delivering and consuming applications.

Unless the industry is ready to declare Apple the sole source of inspiration, then different vendors should pave different paths.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

SpringSource announced Monday its acquisition of Hyperic, a move that signals a new phase of commercial open-source competition.

Until recently, open-source vendors like SpringSource seemed content to play the low-cost commodity foil to the broader product portfolios of their proprietary peers. No more.

SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, the leading open-source application framework for Java, has been nudging beyond its roots for some time. Most recently, SpringSource announced commercial support for Tomcat, arguably the world's most prevalent Java application server. It has also released tools to expedite and facilitate the development of Java applications.

In these ways, it has continued its march toward a more complete Java development model and, in the process, has girded its ability to monetize the otherwise free and open-source Spring Framework. With over half the Fortune 2000 as users of the Spring Framework, it is this ability to turn users into paying customers that has been perhaps most critical to SpringSource's product plans.

With Hyperic, SpringSource completes its vision to provide a "complete suite of software products that accelerate the entire build, run, manage enterprise Java application lifecycle," and moves from framework provider to a true solution provider--one that competes directly with IBM and Microsoft.

The acquisition of Hyperic cements a longstanding partnership between the two companies. SpringSource has been OEM'ing Hyperic's technology since 2007. By acquiring Hyperic, however, SpringSource makes it possible to fully manage the applications that its customers build using the Spring Framework.

As Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, told me in a phone interview:

The SpringSource philosophy has always been about making it easier to build enterprise-grade Java applications. But the pillar of this acquisition is about offering the full application lifecycle: build the applications, run those applications, and then manage those applications using Hyperic.

This is more than a marriage of code. It's about merging the best people in IT management with the best in Java application development. It gives us broader and deeper visibility up and down the software stack and across a company's network and data center, including virtualization and cloud computing environments. It means that we've just reduced and, in some cases, eliminated the gap between application development and IT operations.

Soltero will become CTO of management products with SpringSource.

I asked Soltero about speculation that this acquisition was simply the fulfillment of a whim on the part of Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has invested in both SpringSource and Hyperic and is an active investor in a range of open-source companies. As Soltero explained it, while "Benchmark is of course happy with the combination," it was not involved in promoting it and, for legal reasons, could not be involved.

Regardless, the SpringSource/Hyperic combination creates a clear and present danger to IBM and Microsoft, two companies that have largely stood alone in the ability to build, run, and manage applications. It's also a significant boon to companies looking to open source to save money and improve productivity.

Is it a sign of good things to come from not only SpringSource, but also open source, generally? Time will tell, but I suspect we're on the cusp of an aggressive and ambitious new phase in open-source competition.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Dan Baigent is senior director of corporate development with Sun Microsystems. He's also one of the most candid inside observers on the failures that brought Sun to the point that it had to be bailed out by Oracle in a $7.4 billion acquisition, down from Sun's bubble-era peak of a $200 billion-plus valuation.

In a series of blog posts, Baigent starts to identify Sun's top 10 failures, and their consequences, as he seeks to describe how Sun got to this point.

Actually, he only managed to get his first three reasons posted before the posts were pulled down. However, Google cached them and you can find them below.

I can understand why Sun might not want to highlight its failures, and there may be Securities and Exchange-related reasons for shuttering the posts, but Baigent's commentary is insightful and helpful. I hope Sun will allow Baigent to post his remaining seven reasons.

• Reason No. 10: Failed to understand the x86 market. "We approached the market in the only way we knew how - as an extension of our high-end, low-volume, high-value approach to network computing. And not just in terms of product features and capabilities, but in terms of sales, partnerships, channel programs and supply chain management."
• Reason No. 9: Messing with the Java brand. "(N)umerous attempts by well-meaning marketing folks at Sun to try exploit the value of the Java brand itself and how that ultimately reduced the very value they tried to exploit. To some degree, this is as much about the lack of value in the Sun brand (at least outside our loyal customer base) as it is about Java".
• Reason No. 8: Fumbling Jini. "The real problem was that the engineers had built this technology using the latest Java platform...and had incorporated specific changes into J2SE 1.2 to support the Jini requirements. When launched, Jini could not run in anything smaller than a device with 64MB of memory and a Pentium-class processor.... Meanwhile, Marketing and PR were off describing uses of the technology that were all about small devices (cameras, printers, cell phones, etc.) that were completely unable to run RMI, nonetheless the Jini on which it was built.

I find that I tend to learn much more from my failures than from my successes. I'd be grateful for the chance to learn from Sun's, too. Sun, please let Baigent continue his countdown. It allows Sun to constructively chronicle its own failings, rather than allowing others to do so in less generous terms.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

While the vast majority of Sun Microsystems' current revenue derives from hardware, a new Goldman Sachs report ("CIO view on the Oracle/Sun deal: IT battle lines are being redrawn") suggests that the hardware business is the part of Sun that gives Oracle the least strategic value; Java, Solaris, and MySQL provide the crown jewels of Oracle's newest acquisition.

While Oracle called out Java as "the most important software Oracle has ever acquired," the executive team provided little detail as to what Oracle expected to do with the open-source programming language.

Goldman Sachs provides some sophisticated guesswork:

We would expect Oracle to find ways to leverage its control (of Java) to gain a competitive advantage against IBM in middleware. Additionally, effective monetization of the ubiquitous Java programming language has been a longstanding question for Sun.

Goldman Sachs' Sun Microsystems analyst, David Bailey, estimates that Java-based revenues for Sun should total a little less than $300 million in fiscal year 2009 (June), growing by more than 25 percent year over year...We would expect Oracle to be more aggressive than the culturally more open source-minded Sun in monetizing Java; Oracle's reach should also be considerably greater in opening new relationship opportunities for Java licensing.

Java is an open field, already plowed and planted by Sun, now ready to be harvested by Oracle.

MySQL, however, is another matter, given its competitive tension with Oracle databases, as The Wall Street Journal calls out.

I've suggested that Oracle stands to lose the MySQL development team, if it shoves the open-source database team to the side in an effort to prevent MySQL from cannibalizing its Oracle DB sales. But after assembling a panel including two Fortune 100 CIOs, as well as the CEO of Ingres and former head of IT at NYSE, Goldman Sachs assumes a more optimistic view, arguing that while Oracle will undoubtedly protect its proprietary margins against open-source MySQL, it will also likely use "MySQL as a way to seed customers who will eventually be moved to Oracle database deployments."

Even so, Oracle faces a delicate balancing act, one that nervous MySQL customers are watching with interest. As suggested by the Financial Times, Oracle can't treat Sun's open-source software assets as heavy-handedly as it might like: Java, MySQL, Glassfish, and other Sun assets all come "preloaded" with communities--communities that will chafe at strong-arm tactics from Oracle.

I think that Oracle will figure it out. But my experience with Oracle's community outreach team is that its members don't much like to be questioned on Oracle's motives or actions. This is going to need to change quickly, if Oracle wants to maximize the value of its open-source software assets.

It's one thing to contribute to a project like Linux as one contributor among many. It's quite another to own a project like MySQL, constantly having to worry about stepping on the toes of ancillary contributors. Oracle needs to learn this lesson quickly.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.