Sun Microsystems said Tuesday that it has completed its acquisition of open-source database company MySQL for about $1 billion--and now is turning its attention to other acquisitions.
"In my view it's the most important acquisition in Sun's history," Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said on a conference call Tuesday.
Sun paid about $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock for MySQL. Although it's a big open-source acquisition for the server and software company, it won't be the last, Schwartz said.
"Those companies that have built good high-integrity communities, broad distribution, and some measure of commercial success are those we're going to be interested in," Schwartz said, and there are many that fit that bill. "We believe we're a natural home to a lot of them, and we're going to be putting our balance sheet to work to make that the case."
Marten Mickos, who had been MySQL's chief executive, now is senior vice president of Sun's database group, reporting to Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software.
MySQL may have been Sun's most important acquisition, but it wasn't its biggest. In 2005, Sun spent a net amount of $3.1 billion to acquire StorageTek, a tape storage system maker with a large customer base and revenue stream.
Schwartz wouldn't compare the merits of the two acquisitions, but indicated that MySQL has a strong potential: "The customer base it brings to Sun measures in the millions if not the tens of millions. There are very few companies on Earth that have that capacity to create opportunity for Sun," he said.
Mickos estimated that there are 12 million instances of MySQL installed at present. It's impossible to know exactly, since copies may be downloaded for free and distributed any number of ways.
Sun still will support Derby, PostgreSQL
With the new title, Mickos will lead not only MySQL work, but also other open-source database projects that Sun supports, including Derby and PostgreSQL. Sun will continue its work with those projects, Green said in an interview.
"We fully intend to keep those programs going at the same speed as we did before," Green said. Developers want different packages for different situations, and "Sun is big enough to have more than one going at the same time."
However, MySQL is clearly the priority. For example, the sales support will be much broader than with PostgreSQL when it comes to selling MySQL support subscriptions, Green said.
"Those subscriptions will be sold by the entire Sun software sales force. We've amped up the scale and reach of the sales organization that previously was a much more limited size," Green said.
Schwartz argued the acquisition will make MySQL more palatable to big customers. "The single biggest impediment to success in the marketplace (has been) their comparative inability to provide peace of mind to enterprises that want global service and support," Schwartz said.
For his part, Mickos chose to look at the potential rivals more as allies. "I believed always the enemy is not another open-source database," he said. "We always had a good relationship with the PostgreSQL team."
PostgreSQL is often positioned as more of a traditional database package comparable to Oracle's dominant and proprietary product. MySQL, while steadily accumulating more features useful for that area, has been geared more for what the company has seen as new database usage such as new-generation Internet sites. MySQL is used at the core of Facebook, Google, and YouTube.
Mickos said Sun doesn't plan to move MySQL more toward the traditional database market. "We're following Wayne Gretzky's advice: skate to where puck will be," he said, mentioning "Web services, Web 2.0, telecom, and mobile spaces" as examples.
Faster development, and eventually GPLv3
Being part of Sun will speed development of new features such as Falcon, MySQL's project for a new storage engine used within the overall database, Mickos said. "We now get access to abilities and resources we didn't have before--scaling, performance, memormy management, input-output. That's why we hope to be able to accelerate the road map."
It won't change MySQL's multiplatform approach, though; the database runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS X, and many other operating systems.
MySQL is governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL) since 2000, but the company likely will move to GPLv3, Mickos said.
"We've been part of drafting GPLv3. We like the license. We think it's better than GPLv2 and takes care of some of its weakeness," Mickos said. "But (GPLv2) is the most successful license ever. It will take time to replace it and to move over to next generation, GPLv3. I believe we'll do it at some point, but we haven't decided on a specific point in time yet."
Update 9:15 a.m. PT: I added more details about Sun's acquisition plans. Update 10:30 a.m. PT: I added more information about Sun's acquisition history, MySQL integration details, and licensing and product plans.
Programmers behind the PostgreSQL project released the new version 8.3 of the open-source database software Monday, saying they've boosted improved performance 5 percent to 30 percent and added several useful features.
One of the performance improvements comes from a technology called heap-optimized tables, which reduces the amount of effort a computer must expend updating the frequently changed elements of the database. Other improvements reduce the penalty of taking periodic snapshots of the database and an speed some transactions though an "asynchronous commit" ability, the organization said.
Other features include "synchronized scan," which makes data mining less taxing on servers' input-output communication abilities; the ability to analyze XML data using SQL database queries; the ability to build the PostgreSQL software itself using Microsoft' Visual C++ programming tool for more stability and performance on Windows; a less taxing system for logging; and a built-in text-search tool.
Sun Microsystems has been a major PostgreSQL sponsor, bundling the software with its Solaris operating system, but more recently, Sun decided to pay $1 billion for MySQL, the company behind another open-source database.
Sun's top software executive offered warm words for PostgreSQL.
"PostgreSQL 8.3 is an impressive new release, and we encourage customers around the world to explore it," Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, said in a statement.
The most recent version of the software, 8.2, was released in December 2006, said Josh Berkus, a Sun employee who works on the PostgreSQL project.
Update 8:50 a.m. PST February 5: When asked what its current database priority is, Sun wouldn't be pinned down. "Open source is about choice," Ian Murdock, vice president of Sun's connected developer group, said in a statement. "Sun supports various databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Java DB, and supports the broadest range of technology to maximize flexibility for its customers."
The UltraSparc T2, code-named Niagara 2, has eight cores and can execute 64 simultaneous instruction sequences called 'threads,' switching from one to another when the first stalls waiting for data from the computer's memory.
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)Sun Microsystems on Tuesday followed through on a promise to release the designs of a second server processor as open-source software.
The design for Niagara 2, formally called the UltraSparc T2 and currently shipping in servers, now is governed by the General Public License (GPL)--though as with Niagara 1, Sun is using the earlier version 2 of the seminal license.
The overall initiative, called OpenSparc, is geared to increase the relevance of the Sparc family by building academic and engineering expertise around the processor. To that end, Sun also said five universities have been designated OpenSparc technology centers of excellence: the University of California-Santa Cruz; University of Texas-Austin; University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign; and Carnegie Mellon University.
The T1 and T2 chips both employ an aggressively multithreaded design that can juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. All major chipmakers are employing this approach, though not as dramatically, in an effort to get more work out of processors now that it's hard to boost them through clock speed improvements.
IBM's T-Rex mainframe helped restore the high-end server line to relevance, as did its ability to run Linux. Next up: Solaris?
(Credit: IBM)Free-wheeling Linux was an improbable enough operating system to be used on IBM's mainframe line, but now an even more unlikely operating system is making an appearance there: Sun Microsystems' Solaris.
Sun and IBM have been archenemies for decades, but through the combination of open-source flexibility and something of a detente between the companies, the operating system has arrived. IBM expressed interest in collaborating with engineering firm Sine Nomine Associates, which has been working on a mainframe translation of OpenSolaris since Sun opened the source code in 2005. Now Sine Nomine is demonstrating the software on a System z mainframe.
David Boyes, Sine Nomine's president and chief technologist, described the project (code-named Sirius) for SearchDataCenter.com in a quintet of YouTube videos (first, second, third, fourth, and fifth) from a Gartner conference this week. The actual demonstration, including a pretty pokey boot process and not yet including network support, is in the fourth and fifth videos.
The OpenSolaris port is designed to use the same interface as Linux, Boyes said, meaning that software written for Linux on the mainframe should work on OpenSolaris, too. As with Linux, the operating system runs atop IBM's z/VM virtual-machine foundation rather than on the "bare metal," which eases issues of sharing hardware with other operating systems.
When the software is more mature, making a business case for using it will of course be another challenge entirely. But even absent that real-world relevance, the move does illustrate some success in Sun's ambition to spread Solaris more widely by making it open-source.
Sun's previous chief executive, Scott McNealy, jabbed competitors mercilessly, but his successor, Jonathan Schwartz, has taken a more diplomatic tone, signing Solaris partnerships with Dell and IBM, a chip-supply deal with Intel, and a Windows partnership with Microsoft.
(Via Mainframe Weblog.)
Update: I added comment from Google.
Painful flashbacks are beginning to torment those of us who lived through the Java wars between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft that began 10 years ago.
Earlier this week, Google released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone software project that shun the existing Java standard-setting process in favor of a Google-specific variety. Sun responded on Wednesday by expressing concern that Google's Android project could fragment Java into incompatible versions.
"Anything that creates a more diverse or fractured platform is not in (developers') best interests," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun's software work, speaking to reporters at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "The feedback from developers is, 'Help us fix this.'"
He said Sun wants to work with Google to nip any problems in the bud. "We're really interested in working with Google to make sure developers don't end up with a fractured environment. We're reaching out to Google and assuming they'll be reaching out to us to ensure these platforms and APIs will be compatible so deployment on a wide variety of platforms will be possible," Green said.
Google unrepentant
Google didn't adopt a terribly conciliatory tone in its response, arguing that when it comes to Java fragmentation, Android is the solution, not the problem.
"Google and the other members of the Open Handset Alliance are working to help solve fragmentation and supporting the developer community by creating Android, a mobile platform that responds to the needs of the developers, has the backing of industry leaders, and will be available as open source under a nonrestrictive license," Google said in a statement.
And asked whether it would discuss the issue with Sun, Google said, "We're talking with industry leaders around the world about Android and the Open Handset Alliance but we're not commenting on any of those discussions."
On Monday, Google indicated that it expects fellow members of the Open Handset Alliance phones who are working on the Android phones to help keep its variation of Java familiar to programmers.
Java today is governed by the Java Community Process, in which a number of companies vote on which features to accept into the Java system and create standard mechanisms called application programming interfaces (APIs) by which Java software can use those features. The extent to which Android will or must conform to these APIs is not clear.
For those who need a refresher on the Microsoft history here, the software company licensed Java back in the 1990s, way before it became open-source software. However, Microsoft added some features to Java that meant that it could work differently on Windows machines, a move Sun saw as undermining the "write once, run anywhere" promise of the technology.
Sun Microsystems' move to make its core Java software a true open-source project may still be a project in its early stages, but on Monday the effort produced some concrete results: a partnership with long-time holdout Red Hat.
The top Linux seller announced Monday that it's signed an OpenJDK Community agreement, a move that gives it access to the Sun compatibility kit that can be used to ensure a Java software foundation meets requirements to properly run Java software. Although Java has caught on widely in the server market--Red Hat's core customer base--Red Hat shied away from tight Java ties and sometimes criticized Sun for its earlier semi-proprietary Java ways.
Now they companies are best of pals. "Red Hat fully supports Sun's courageous decision to open source Java technology. After more than 10 years of continuous leadership, the Java technology ecosystem will enter an era of accelerated innovation and benefit from extreme pervasiveness on a wide range of environments," said Sacha Labourey, chief technology officer of Red Hat's JBoss division, which sells support for Java server software.
I know, I know, it sounds like the usual sort of corporate platitude you can read in countless news releases. But its sentiment carries stronger weight and authority after you compare it to this 2004 statement from Red Hat's then-CTO, Michael Tiemann (disclosure: Tiemann is now a blogger in the CNET blog network, too), directed at Jonathan Schwartz, now Sun chief executive: "You say that you love the open-source community, but how much? If you love the open-source community, you'd open source Java. If you won't open source Java, it means you don't love us, or at least you don't trust us. Why, then, should we trust you?"
The JBoss group, which Red Hat acquired in 2006, had already participated in Sun's Java development process, but only for the Java Enterprise Edition software for servers. Now the agreement extends to Java Standard Edition, which contains the core "runtime" software to actually execute Java programs. Through the deal, Red Hat will eventually deliver its own Java runtime software, the company said.
"By signing the contributor agreement, we, Red Hat and JBoss, now have the mechanism in place whereby our engineers can properly work on a wide range of Sun-sponsored open-source projects, including OpenJDK," said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss.
Sun Microsystems has released the first results of a project to give its open-source Solaris effort a Linux-like programming approach and a stronger connection to other parts of the open-source movement.
Late Wednesday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based server and software maker released for download Project Indiana, now formally called OpenSolaris Developer Preview. It's the precursor to a supported product due in early 2008 that's slated to be called OpenSolaris 3/08.
In the long run, Sun hopes to make Solaris more digestible to a larger audience, much of which is familiar with Linux but not with noted Solaris features such as DTrace diagnostic tool and the ZFS file system.
A screenshot of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview booted from a LiveCD and running on a Dell laptop. CNET News.com reporter Stephen Shankland details his experience with the software below.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)"We have made it easier for new users to come into Solaris and be more or less immediately productive," said Ian Murdock, whom Sun hired in March to lead Project Indiana. And Solaris should benefit from exposure to the broader open-source world, he hopes: "It's not so much about bringing Linux into OpenSolaris as it is about opening up Solaris so it can better bring in all the technology the open-source community develops."
Murdock is pleased with how fast Project Indiana arrived. "We can't understate how quickly we have moved from articulating the future direction to actually starting to deliver on it."
Things might have moved fast in the last six months, but the rest of the open-source world too has been changing rapidly in the nearly three years since Sun started releasing the first source code underlying its Solaris version of Unix. In that time, Ubuntu rose from nowhere to become a significant force in the Linux market while OpenSolaris has largely remained a hodgepodge of scattered projects.
Sun worked to introduce outsiders to OpenSolaris, and a few efforts sprouted up to package it into something useful. But Sun didn't initially spearhead a unified effort to assemble these bits and pieces into the equivalent of a Linux distribution--an installable and usable collection of core components, utilities, and higher-level software.
Project Indiana changes that by bundling several features from Sun with others from outside efforts such as Nexenta into a single CD that can be run and used to install OpenSolaris.
"Ultimately, the goal is (to) deliver both Sun and non-Sun innovation to the market in as integrated and rapid a fashion as possible," Murdock said. OpenSolaris updates will arrive every six months, and following the footsteps of Red Hat and Novell, the fast-moving software project will be gradually transferred into the full-fledged Solaris, which develops at a slower pace but features long-term commercial support.
Growing pains
But retrofitting an open-source movement to the previously proprietary Solaris isn't an easy process. For example, OpenSolaris began within Sun and still is dominated by its programmers, whereas Linux started as a grassroots effort and is much more decentralized. Although there's an OpenSolaris Governing Board, Sun holds the Solaris and OpenSolaris trademark, and Murdock himself announced on Tuesday that Project Indiana would get the OpenSolaris name.
"For all intents and purposes, Indiana is OpenSolaris in binary form," that which a computer can run directly without help from a programmer, Murdock said in a mailing list posting. He disagreed with the view that the term could refer to a small collection of core components on which others can build their own OpenSolaris variants: "Given that much of the world already assumes OpenSolaris is an operating environment...OpenSolaris must be something new users can download and install."
But that decision didn't sit well with some, including Joerg Schilling, the leader of the SchilliX OpenSolaris-based distribution project begun two and a half years ago.
"The chance for a single OpenSolaris distro as a joint effort from Sun and the community has been missed, because Sun was not ready for this at the time when it had been possible," Schilling said in one OpenSolaris mailing list posting. "It is most unprobable that Indiana will be the OpenSolaris distribution of the community as it was not 'the community' that did decide to start the project."
Another cultural issue has been Sun's explorations of whether to offer Solaris under the General Public License (GPL) that governs Linux. Currently Solaris is governed by the Community Development and Distribution License, which precludes easy code sharing between the two operating systems, but Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz and others have floated the GPL idea.
The response by some in the Solaris community who see Linux as undesirable was one of revulsion. Ultimately, the governing board voiced its disapproval of dual licensing, arguing that there are downsides but "little, if any, benefit to dual-licensing OpenSolaris...aside from possible short term good press for the project."
That suggests that not everyone will be excited to see Solaris with a Linux face, as Project Indiana shows. The OpenSolaris Developer Preview features the stock Gnome user interface and GNU tools widely used in the Linux realm. That means command-line options run as they do in Linux, down to the command options, Murdock said, though the classic Solaris environment is another option and older scripts will run in the new environment.
But Murdock thinks Sun has struck the right balance.
"The existing community of users is very passionate about Solaris," he said. "We're having to be very cautious in how we thread the needle there."
My test drive
I can confirm that Sun has made major progress in making Solaris accessible. I've installed Linux successfully many times, but when I first tried Solaris Express Community Edition in 2005, I gave up after several hours of struggles that didn't even yield a useful command-line interface.
On Thursday, however, booting the new Project Indiana CD took me 2 minutes and 10 seconds on a Dell XPS M1210 laptop, complete with the graphical Gnome interface.
Bear in mind here that I'm no guru, so my earlier problems could have been anything from obvious to obscure, but either way, this is a big improvement. And although I'm not the target market, it's certainly progress that somebody who's not a Solaris sysadmin can get it working.
However, not everything was flawless. In an inversion of the usual troubles, the operating system balked at using a wired network connection while working smoothly with my wireless adapter. Also, the fonts are ugly, with an un-antialiased capital U. And the operating system noticed but failed to mount a USB drive I inserted. For a better look at Indiana, though, check sites such as Blastwave.
Shiny new features
Indiana features several new features that Sun eventually plans to bring to Solaris proper. Among them:
• A "live media" installation that lets people try out OpenSolaris by booting it from a CD or flash drive. The software can be installed after that boot process if desired, and extra packages can be installed through downloads. This feature came from the Nexenta work, Murdock said.
• The xVM variant of the Xen virtualization software, which lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer. Xen today relies on Linux software to provide a virtualization foundation, but xVM uses Solaris in its stead.
• A new software packaging system that works like Debian's apt tool, letting users more easily download software updates from the Internet that lets the computer automatically handle finding and retrieving other secondary components that are required.
• A new graphical installer called Caiman that's designed to be easier to use.
• The ability to boot from a ZFS hard-drive partition. Solaris currently uses the older Unix File System, but Sun ZFS includes more advanced features for data protection, large-scale storage systems, and networking.
A month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun Microsystems, alleging the server and software company's ZFS file system infringes seven NetApp patents. Sun on Thursday fired back with a suit that claims NetApp violates 12 of Sun's.
Sun's suit also argues that NetApp's patents are invalid and that it doesn't infringe them anyway. And it requests an injunction prohibiting the company from selling any products that infringe Sun's patents.
Patent suits are often expensive and acrimonious proceedings, and they're particularly unpleasant when fought among Silicon Valley rivals who often share mutual customers and sometimes even are business partners. The Sun-NetApp case is particularly interesting in that it's being fought in the blogosphere as well as U.S. District Court's Eastern Texas district: Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz and NetApp founder Dave Hitz have been taking potshots at each other and expressing disappointment at the rival's needlessly litigious behavior as the case proceeded.
For a reporter such as myself who's heard "no comment" in response to countless queries about legal actions, these blogs add significant flavor to otherwise dry court proceedings. But being vocal about legal actions also can backfire, as in the case of The SCO Group's CEO, Darl McBride, whose very public accusations went over poorly with judges overseeing his case.
Sun legal counsel Mike Dillon on Thursday added his take for the countersuit, painting NetApp as a company that can't deal with the shift to open-source software. "But, it's clear that NetApp views the open source world much differently than Sun. We've made the transition--they can't contemplate it," Dillon said.
Hitz, meanwhile, posted his own response to the suit, publishing a note he sent to NetApp employees that assures them they still have jobs and assuring customers they still can buy NetApp products.
"Even for the RIM/Blackberry case, which is the closest I can think of to a big company being shut down, it took years and years to get to that point, and was still averted in the end. I think it's safe to say the odds of Sun fulfilling their threat are near zero," Hitz said.
One thing Hitz said he finds "frustrating is the way Jonathan wraps himself in the open-source flag. We aren't against open source, and we aren't even against non-commercial use of ZFS. The number one rule of open source is that you should only give away stuff that belongs to you. That is what this suit is about, and everything else is just fluff."
A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning.
"This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes this suit to reach court--NetApp will be doing just fine," Hitz said in a blog posting Thursday.
In a September lawsuit, NetApp accused Sun of infringing seven patents. Specifically, NetApp believes Sun's ZFS file system infringes on patents related to NetApp's rival WAFL software. Sun has released ZFS as open-source software, and Apple is among those using it.
According to Schwartz, NetApp wants Sun to "retract (ZFS) from the free software community," but he said that's impossible. Hitz sees things differently.
"Jonathan seems to be arguing that once something has been put into open source, it is beyond the law," Hitz said. "Jonathan's claim that 'you cannot unfree what is free' sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that you can steal anything, as long as you open source it afterwards. That can't be right!...One of the most important rules of open source is that you must only give away things that belong to you."
Updated at 2:31 p.m. PDT: Sun Microsystems plans to countersue Network Appliance later this week, Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday, a suit that will include a request to remove the company's products from the market.
Schwartz said on his blog that he has "no interest whatever in suing them" and therefore "reached out" to Chief Executive Dan Warmenhoven. But, he said, NetApp's demands--that Sun "retract" its ZFS file system from open-source community and restrict its use to computing and not storage devices--can't be met.
Consequently, "Later this week, we're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license--on which Network Appliance was started," Schwartz said.
NetApp wasn't immediately available for comment. But don't be surprised if there is some: founder Dave Hitz has been outspoken about the lawsuit on his blog.
Sun spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek said Sun has a Friday deadline to respond to NetApp's suit, which accused Sun of violating seven patents.
Since ZFS is part of Sun's open-source Solaris work, there are open-source ramifications to the case. And Schwartz is trying to use the connection to curry favor with the vocal and increasingly influential collaborative programming movement.
"We will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform," Schwartz said, pointing specifically to the Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent Project. "Whatever's left over will fuel a venture fund fostering innovation in the free software community."
Open-source software may be copied, modified and redistributed freely. One company interested in ZFS is Apple, which is including ZFS as an option in Leopard, the Mac OS X 10.5 update due Friday.
Apple need not worry about NetApp, Schwartz said.
"Apple is including ZFS in their upcoming Leopard OS X release. This is happening without any payment to Sun," Schwartz said. "Under the license, we've waived all rights to sue them for any of the patents or copyright associated with ZFS. We've let Apple know we will use our patent portfolio to protect them and the Mac ZFS community from NetApp--with or without a commercial relationship to Sun."
