Red Hat announced a new JBoss Open Choice program today that gives developers the ability to employ and deploy more Java frameworks and applications than had previously been available.
With JBoss Open Choice, Red Hat says it "plans to provide application developers with the ability to choose the framework, language and programming technologies that best fit the application requirements they are trying to achieve without sacrificing reliability, availability, scalability or manageability across their projects."
Basically, this means that JBoss will interoperate more readily with popular programming models such as Spring, Seam, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit, all of which can be viewed as competitors to the JBoss app server.
While not earth-shaking, this announcement provides insight into the Java application server market--which is being supplanted in many situations by simple programming models. It also shows that a strategy of open-ness and integration, even with competitive products, is an inevitable path.
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One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.
Most open source vendors have tweaked their business models to include some kind of additional value only available as part of a subscription. This has brought various cries of derision suggesting that the code is no longer good as the community doesn't get to do QA, along with welcoming arms from investors and developers who want to monetize the code.
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After more than five years participating in the open-source realm, I always find it interesting that we continue to ask the same questions about open-source companies versus projects, and consistently mix them up. Admittedly, we haven't always made it easy on ourselves with confusing licenses, varied revenue models, and reliance on a free product to manifest itself as a revenue stream.
Open source is a development and distribution strategy that software developers use to get their products into the hands of users. It's not a business model.
The business model is found in the additional value that developers (which are often vendors) put on top of the software in the form of support, additional features, etc. These provide revenue opportunities, which in turn creates a business.
An open-source "company" is the the strategic implementation of monetization efforts around an open-source software product.
... Read moreI was lucky enough to hang out with Sarah Lacy and shoot a segment on Yahoo Tech Ticker and discuss how big the market for open source is, and how big it can get. We talk about MySQL, Zimbra, JBoss, Oracle and others.
In the interview process she hits me with some good questions about open source but fails to mention that I killed it on "Spanish Castle Magic" on Guitar Hero minutes before. She went with the predictable "Higher Ground" but managed to rock out really hard.
Can you build a billion-dollar business by selling software on the cheap, or even giving it away for free? That's the central question haunting the Valley as open source startups struggle to go from big installed bases of customers to big businesses.
It's clear that I need to have my own Tv show or at least Sarah should have me back every few weeks to talk about technology. I am the tech world's Uncle Floyd.
A month or so ago I saw a press release that discussed how JBoss was working with iWay to "bring a full range of information management capabilities to global organizations" and didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought so little that I just ignored it until today someone mentioned that they couldn't find that release on the RedHat website. After a bit of digging we figured out that it must have been an iWay release and that RH decided to lump it into a bigger press release about their SOA (service oriented architecture) platform.
In the Red Hat release there are a number of new JBoss partners, only one of whom has any open source products. The real IT world has both open source and proprietary products and they all need to work together. And lots of companies use the JBoss app server very successfully with all kinds of applications.
But the SOA products have been a bit slow out of the gate and so it's the iWay partnership that I find interesting as it begs a few important questions.
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MySQL's Zack Urlocker published an article called Sitting Duck, which gives you a great 13-point checklist to figure out if your company is screwed. If you do a quick analysis you can predict a bit of the future and also use hindsight to figure out if the company's strategy went sideways.
In light of all the hub-bub around Oracle trying to acquire BEA let's take a quick pass and see if the company is flailing based on a few of Zack's points.
Is everyone in your market having trouble?
No. In fact the application server/middleware/SOA space is growing at an alarming rate. The fact that Oracle wants BEA means that they see more opportunity that can be exploited and that they are more capable of generating dollars than BEA is with that product set. If we agree that BEA is struggling, they seem to believe it's because of their cost structure and not their products. Which leads to...
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