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02 April 2007

China Open Source Software Summit, Beijing

[srw — There are a collection of links to presentations, blogs, and photos at the end of this post.  Please don't hesitate to forward other links as you find them (regardless of language), and I'll add them to the lists.  Thanks.  (Updated lists 7-Apr-2007, 16:36, and again 26-Apr-2007, 13:16)]

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stephenrwalli's Beijing Open Source Forum photoset stephenrwalli's Beijing Open Source Forum photoset

It started when a friend organized a meeting in her Beijing offices the last days of January with the conference hosts for the upcoming 2007 Software Innovation Summit.  She had invited the appropriate people from both CoSoft (a government funded organization) and CIO Insight (a Ziff-Davis publication).  After a long discussion in Chinese, she turned to me, "So here's the deal ...."  If I could find a small amount of external sponsorship, they would allow me to organize the speaking agenda for the Open Source Software Forum part of the Summit — a one day affair. 

Part of the reason I was even in Beijing was to determine what it would take to hold a proper open source software conference in China by the end of the year.  In two trips to Beijing in three months I had seen a lot of interest, excitement and energy around open source software. This seemed a good opportunity to start to understand what it would actually take to organize such an event.  I mean really — how hard could it be?  Even if it was just eight weeks until 27 March. 

There was all manner of fun along the way:

  • Chinese New Year "appeared" in the middle of the planning cycle, cutting 10 days out of the time line.  Everyone goes home for at least a week for the Spring Festival.  Welcome to the Year of the Pig! 
  • Most companies can't sponsor anything with eight [short] weeks of notice.
  • That said, I found two sponsors reasonably quickly, but needed one more to be able to actually afford the expenses for me to attend the event I was organizing.  And I found the third!  And I booked my tickets.  And then that sponsor had to bail!  There was a tense 24 hours while I found my second third sponsor.  And this was all under two weeks before I needed to get on a plane.
  • We were also going to have another Open Tuesday event the evening of 27 March.  My co-conspirator (Mikko) was traveling to S. Africa and Spain on other Open Tuesday business for the last two weeks before Beijing, and proceeded to (a.) get really sick on the road, (b.) have his mobile phone stolen, (c.) discover how bad Internet connectivity can be from even good hotels in Johannesburg.   That was one very long 12 days for both of us. 
  • In the last week, the day before one speaker was due to get on a plane, we discovered their business invitation letter to obtain their visa was not appropriate.  That was another tense 24 hour scramble.  (And this was one of the speakers I really really wanted to be there.) 
  • This was my third trip to Beijing in four months, and the first five star hotel where all the front desk staff were uncomfortable in English.  So it was a fun challenge trying to get reservations sorted out, among other small problems.
  • Monday morning, I head downstairs.  I've basically planned on an entire day to sort out whatever needs to be done getting ready for the next day.  My front desk inquiry about "tomorrow's conference" leads me to the catering office, where I was greeted with, "What conference?"   And that was just the start of Monday.  Much of Monday was spent tensely watching the organization unfold without the benefit of a common language to ask questions, and no prior conference organization experience to know what should happen next.  (Prior experience on program committees does not a conference organizer make.) I really need to get a more relaxing hobby. 

Despite a hectic eight weeks, the day came off without a hitch.  It was brilliant!  There were seats for about 100 people, but they brought in probably another 12-20 seats for the overflow.  I had friends in the audience that said the translations were excellent, and the conference attendees all really enjoyed the talks.  (It was much better than they anticipated.)  The conference hosts (CoSoft and CIO Insight) were really pleased.  My speakers all felt they learned a lot from this experience, including a couple of speakers that had already made trips to their own vendor events in Beijing. 

I owe a lot to my friends here. 

  • My sponsors for trusting I could pull it off: Google (Chris Dibona), O'Reilly Radar (Nat Torkington), and the Linux Foundation (Jim Zemlin). 
  • My speakers for taking time out of their busy schedules to travel to Beijing and see first hand what I'm seeing around open source software in China:  Nat Torkington (O'Reilly Radar),  Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Mike Olson (Oracle), Jim Grisanzio (Sun), Taiwen Jiang (XOOPS China),  Mikko Puhakka (Open Tuesday), Calvin Sun (MySQL).  Most of them had to travel a long way to get there. 
  • My friends for their encouragement and support: Anne Stevenson-Yang for getting me involved and cheering me on, Ada Wang (Anne's analyst and my negotiator), Jethro Cramp (running additional air cover for me in Beijing and keeping me sane late at night over his early morning tea).
  • Jing Jing Helles for all her translation work on speaker presentations.  While we had full simultaneous translation in session, the presentations were something we still had to do ourselves.  I wanted the Chinese attendees to have the information in Chinese to carry away. 
  • James Ding was the primary point of contact at CIO Insight.  He made the logistics happen.  It was a great day. 

Here are all the presentations and current translations.  I'm working at getting the audio up as well. 

Blog and news coverage:

Some official Chinese news coverage (in Chinese) based on the CoSoft news item (thanks to D.J.):

meetthepress.JPG

We get to "meet the press" at day's end. L-to-R: Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Jim Grisanzio, Nat Torkington, Mikko Puhakka.  Taiwen Jiang and I are off camera.   

02 April 2007 at 00:18 | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (3)


09 March 2007

The Best Presentation on Software Business and Open Source I've Ever Seen

Brent Williams presented “Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007” at EclipseCon Tuesday.   Brent is a (temporarily) independent equity research analyst.  Unlike so many “Wall Street” types, he approaches the discussion from the economics of what people do, rather than what they say they do.  Similar to r0ml in content, there are always surprises along the along the way.

Brent has graciously allowed me to post the slides.  Brent's analysis and mine are congruent on many topics, but he brings clarity to the topic and a wealth of experience.  He starts with a tear down of the Oracle Linux debate and the Microsoft Novell deal.  I especially like his tear down of the commoditization myth and his observations around interface standards versus standards of implementation.  A couple of slides in the presentation don't quite stand alone, but for the most part the deck is brilliant. 

Enjoy!

09 March 2007 at 01:01 | | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)


30 January 2007

Unshakeable MySQL

Matt Aslett interviewed Mårten Mickos (MySQL CEO) and during the interview, Mårten admitted that Oracle is hinting that they will release "Unbreakable MySQL" and essentially offer support for MySQL more cheaply.  If Oracle is actually considering this, then they still really really don't get it: 

  • As bad an idea as "Unbreakable Linux" might be, it is at least a product complement to Oracle's own product.  "Unbreakable MySQL" is a competing product, and not even Oracle's applications business would benefit from a "less expensive database" unless Oracle actually wants to move all its applications to MySQL and completely destroy their Oracle database business.
  • The actual MySQL Network offering is much more than mere support, so Oracle would be offering an inferior product, instead of a competing product.  This is not about offering an Oracle-tuned Red Hat Linux.  If I had to choose between Oracle and MySQL, I know which set of engineers I would want supporting my MySQL Cluster high-availability environment. 
  • With today's announcement they are even more price competitive than they've ever been.

MySQL actually made two announcements today.  MySQL has recorded their best year ever in their 11 year history:

  • They've seen record growth in enterprise subscriptions and incredible marque customers. 
  • They've released new technology around high-availability clusters and their pluggable architecture.
  • Their community of users continues to grow as strongly, feeding their customer base. 

Zack Urlocker (MySQL VP Marketing) started the week with a post on disruptive business models in general, and followed up today with a post on MySQL's own business model and its inventiveness.  MySQL AB is a company that deeply understands that open source software is an excellent business tool, and how to best apply it.  They understand that the software and its source code are a great customer engagement mechanism, and that the product they sell to solve customer problems is much more than just the database software. 

Congratulations, Mårten, Zack, and the rest of the great team at MySQL AB.  Well done!

30 January 2007 at 06:23 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


05 November 2006

Oracle and Red Hat Redux

I've been asked several times since arriving in Beijing what I think about Oracle's recently announced move to support Red Hat linux cheaper than Red Hat prices it. I've certainly been vocal in the past about Oracle and their possible Linux distro.  Dave Gynn and I were having this discussion before I flew to China.  So here's how it lays out.

It's Good for Customers:
It is certainly going to create some perceived competition for Red Hat.  r0ml has told the story of his time at Merril Lynch and his frustration with Red Hat's support and maintenance pricing.  He was happy to pay maintenance on each and every machine in his server cluster.  However, paying for a fixed number of support calls on each and every machine in the cluster rather than a cluster wide number of calls was a little frustrating.  With competition comes creativity, and I have confidence that Red Hat will meet the pricing challenge with an appropriate customer valued offering. 

It's Good for Oracle:
I was pretty vocal in the Spring and Summer about how it would be engineering inefficient for Oracle to eat the cost of maintaining an entire "forked" distro themselves.  Ellison was pretty clear back in the Spring, however, that Red Hat wasn't meeting the needs of his customers with updates, etc. 

Instead of living on a complete fork, Oracle will now ensure the stability of their offering to their customers by supporting them directly with the necessary patches.  This is certainly less expensive than running their own distro.

It's Not Necessarilly Bad for Red Hat:
There's certainly been lots of doom and gloom voiced about Red Hat's future and speculation about whether or not Oracle wants to weaken Red Hat to acquire it.  There's been lots of had wringing about the future of open source software businesses as more "big vendors" get involved. 

Piffle.

First, Red Hat's business continues to grow at a nice pace.  There are lots of new Red Hat customers (and existing customers expanding) that are not Oracle users and that still want the level of service and support provided by Red Hat.  These types of customers aren't going to flock to Oracle for "cheap" support, because that's not what Oracle is actually going to be good at.  As MySQL and Postgres deployments continue to grow (possibly on Red Hat linux), Oracle will also have a different set of things to worry about.   

Second, it's actually an opportunity for Red Hat to re-open discussions with Oracle about providing support for Red Hat Linux that meets Oracle's needs.  It would still be more engineering efficient (likely) for Red Hat engineers to do the work for Oracle.  So Oracle would win, and Red Hat would continue to reap the back end (reduced) revenue, as Oracle continues to drive deployments. 

Lastly, Oracle is participating in the open source community, just like IBM, Sun, Novell, and every other vendor of note.  Each participates to their own needs, contributing appropriately in community.  Saying that "open source software" is at risk suggests that each of these vendors has the same motives, to somehow bring down open source by turning it back into a proprietary world.  That's just clearly not true, even if it were possible.

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05 November 2006 at 04:13 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


18 August 2006

Oracle Linux Rumours Continue

Rumours began in the Spring around Oracle delivering it's own Linux distribution and resurfaced this week during LinuxWorld on Jeff Nolan's blog, where the rumour suggests the Oracle version will be based on Red Hat's distro.  The fun bit was Jeff's update to his entry:

UPDATE: Oracle’s investor relations group is now saying that the announcement will be pushed out possibly past OpenWorld in October.

So apparently Oracle remains coy about the rumour.  My opinions haven't changed from the blog posting I wrote in the Spring.  Oracle taking on its own distro rather than continuing to contribute to the community is engineering inefficient and a waste of shareholder money, and it doesn't solve the customer's problem any better.  If Red Hat  is unreasonably behind in delivering the platform to Oracle's needs, they could better invest in the relationship than in undertaking to take on their own distro based on Red Hat. 

Dave Gynn and I were part of an email discussion, and he gave me permission to share his ideas as well: 

Creating a distro based on Red Hat ties Oracle to Red Hat's release cycle and roadmap.  It will be difficult and expensive to offer support for Red Hat that can compete with Red Hat's own Red Hat Network offering.  Oracle is just an expensive middleman whose value is unclear.

If anything, this only makes Red Hat stronger.  Oracle will be required by the GPL to make available any modifications they make.  So the Red Hat codebase will benefit.  Developers will continue to target Red Hat since applications that work on Red Hat should work on Oracle's derivative distro.

With their own distro, Oracle will neglect support for the Oracle database and other applications on other Linux distros.  Open source databases like Postgres and MySQL which run well on all distros will continue to be a more flexible solution.

There is no reason to believe that an Oracle Linux distribution would be compelling or successful. 

Well said.  Oracle is still very like some other software companies, praising open source on the one hand around Linux, but with contradictory rhetoric on the other hand around such things as Postgres and EnterpriseDB and MySQL.  Oracle Linux, or Oracle Red Hat Linux, would be bad business for Oracle. 

The Spring posts:

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18 August 2006 at 17:57 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


17 April 2006

Oracle Linux: Novell or Red Hat? (Hopefully neither!)

Updated 18-Apr-2006, 13:30: Added the postscript on the Boston Globe quote. 

This morning saw reports in the Financial Times that "Oracle considers venturing into Linux".  This was picked up by CNet (via Reuters) which set up the discussion about Oracle's desire to deliver a entire stack of technology to customers, and then drew attention to the quote that Oracle has even "considered buying Novell."  And thus are rumour mills fed.  Let's actually look at the discussion in a business context:

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ellison said that Oracle wanted to sell a full “stack” of software that, ... included both operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a complete stack,” he said. “We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.”

Not an unreasonable opinion.  Go all the way back to Geoff Moore and Crossing the Chasm (1991).  You want to present a "whole product" solution to your customer, i.e. your core revenue driver and all the complements you can reasonably provide that your customer perceives as the complete solution to their problem.  If to sell an Oracle "solution" today means Oracle licenses and Oracle vertical specific applications, AND an expensive operating system on expensive hardware, AND an expensive application server, then reducing the overall cost to the customer while driving the core revenue generators would seem to be A Good Idea. 

As part of a recent study of the open source software market, Mr Ellison said that Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux. “We look at everything, play this thing out,” he added.

This statement should not surprise anyone that has worked in a large enterprise with a view of the executive offices.  Companies explore ideas on paper constantly in their corporate/business development offices.  Lot's of "what if" scenarios are played out, and numbers crunched without anyone ever committing to doing something.  Companies even pay good money to the McKinsey's of the world for this sort of analysis even if they have their own inhouse "business consulting team". I'm sure Oracle has also run the numbers on Red Hat and SuSE (before the Novell acquisition) and developing their own distribution at various times in the past, and will do so again.   

“Now that Red Hat . . . competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the relationship – so does IBM,” he said.

This last quote is the troublesome one (or maybe it's a misquote without context).  Oracle is the enterprise relational database company.  It's been expanding its brand with vertical specific Oracle applications.  It needs middleware (i.e. an app server), like it needs an operating system on which to run, but it isn't a middleware company. 

Go back to the original business goal expressed in the article, that Ellison wants to provide a complete stack or solution to his customer.  Good idea, but he has better ways to spend shareholder dollars to solve customer problems than acquiring the stack outright, and then living with the cultural consequences and long term engineering expenses of becoming an "operating system company" and an "app server company" as well as their primary focus as the enterprise database company.  Spending good money to get into other rapidly commoditizing businesses, rather than serving your customers needs by supporting companies like Red Hat with its JBoss acquisition that already know how to make money in a different margin business seems a waste.

As I suggested Friday, Oracle should be hammering down Red Hat's door to expand the relationship with all the money they saved by not acquiring JBoss, or in this case (hopefully) Novell.

P.S. You have to love news editors.  I was interviewed by Hiawatha Bray from the Boston Globe yesterday.  The quote as it appeared:

But Stephen Walli, vice president of Optaros Inc., an open source consulting firm in Cambridge, said buying Novell or Red Hat would be a mistake for Oracle.

''They would have to carry all that cost on their balance sheet," Walli said. ''I think it would be a really bad idea."

This is why I blog the whole idea.  While accurate, the quote could mean it was a mistake for Oracle's business to carry the engineering expense compared to the value to their solution to their customers (which was meant), OR that Novell or Red Hat are dogs that one wouldn't want on one's balance sheet (which wasn't meant).  Maybe I'm being overly sensitive. 

 

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17 April 2006 at 15:16 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (3)


18 February 2006

Oracle, Open Source and Rumours of War

Oracle has acquired SleepyCat Software and is rumoured to be in talks with Zend and JBoss to round out the slate.  Here's the (always) brilliant Redmonk commentary from Stephen O'Grady.  Mike Olsen's commentary is obviously relevant, as the CEO inside the deal in as much as he can talk about it.  The press ran amok with it, with too many articles to helpfully list here. The fear and uncertainty commentary (ZDnet, Newsforge) is unhelpful. 

Here's an extra few observations to build upon Stephen's commentary:

  • SleepyCat's dual license is "if you're free-and-open-source-software you can use our software for free and if you're charging for a license we want our share."  This is the same as MySQL world the GPL as the public license, and driving their OEM embedded business through a different license.  Here's the exposure: while MySQL can continue to drive their "free software" business without Oracle's permission regardless of Oracle's position on future licensing, their embedded business presumably depends upon the ability to OEM license SleepyCat. I know the MySQL tech leadership and business leadership well enough to know they would have been thinking about this for some time.  While I'm sure Marten is watching the competition closely, my bet is this was expected and MySQL has a plan.  So Marten's ever so quotable "It would be like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean" isn't bravado — it's just everyday business in a competitive world.
     
  • Culture comes from the top.  If there's a strong executive sponsor at Oracle that wants to get engaged with the open source world (as there was at Novell with executives like Chris Stone and Al Nugent), then the injection of the DNA may actually take hold. Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman were the Ximian DNA, but without strong sponsorship from the executive levels, that DNA would never have taken.  Stone and Nugent were their long enough that the Ximian team could get things started, and the SuSE team probably had it much easier. 
     
  • The Zend rumour (if true) is actually pretty simple.  They're the PHP developer tools company.  And while Oracle would love everyone to be writing big expensive applications in Java with a long entrenched life time against the Oracle database engine, they have probably discovered that developers script a ton of Oracle access in PHP.  Make those developers happy.  They're the ones that will make the move to MySQL, bringing it through the back door.  If IBM is sleeping with the premier tools company around PHP, buy it outright, and break up that play at the same time.
  • The rumoured JBoss acquisition has two equally compelling features, depending upon whether you're following the (historical) SAP playbook or the IBM one.
    • First, the IBM game.  Seven years ago (maybe eight), IBM showed up in the Apache community.  They slowly began to play by the rules and earn a reputation.  At the heart of their Websphere engine was an HTTP server, which is pretty fundamental.  Why build your own when the Apache license allows you to embed the public one.  And to be clear, the economics says you want to amortize as much of the dev/test/support/maint as you can of the complement called an HTTP server. And when they began SELLING Websphere on top of Apache, then everyone thought the open source community was going to freak.  And it didn't because within the Apache world IBM was playing by the rules — making sound contributions, etc.  So Oracle could be getting rid of the overhead of an Oracle complement that's costing too much. Acquiring it makes more sense than leaving it to the vagaries of IBM after the Gluecode acquisition.
    • The SAP playbook says that to drive sales into the mid-tier (because you already own the Fortune 1000) you have to give the customer the complement (SAPDB, now MaxDB from MySQL) to sell them the core (R3).  The rumoured Oracle JBoss acquisition may be a play to give the customer a less expensive app server to drive the core revenue around the database.

It's just business.  And who knows, Oracle may even be waking up to the business tactics of open source software as IBM did 7-8 years ago, and will begin to contribute appropriate to their own lines of business and to the benefit of their customer engagements. 

18 February 2006 at 21:15 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)