IBM, Gluecode, and Open Source Business as Usual

Update: You can find a podcast of this blog entry here.
IBM announced the acquisition of Gluecode this week. In their own words: "Now customers and Business Partners can tap into the low cost of entry of open source technology to quickly develop and deploy applications, and migrate to WebSphere software as business needs expand." There's some nice commentary around the benefits of open source and the strength of trusted enterprise level service and support, and they very clearly position the Gluecode Geronimo offering as entry level application serving on a diagram showing the evolution to scaled high transactions on Websphere. Here's the CNET article on the announcement with some good thinking around it.

Stephen O'Grady (RedMonk) has a great Q&A styled analysis of the acquisition which I would encourage you to read, so I'll provide (hopefull) supporting commentary.

• IBM seems to understand Geoff Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle really well. They have done a lot of work around Linux (with an incredible number of influence touch points) to manage the AIX curve. While selling Linux aggressively against Sun, they have told us that AIX will absolutely be replaced by Linux ... in 10 years. This is about customer account management and control and giving customers well crafted messages through the relationship.
• Recently, Gartner moved JBoss into the same upper right quadrant of the app server world with Microsoft, WebSphere, and WebLogic. Love such reports or hate them, a lot of enterprise executives read Gartner reports and attend Gartner conferences. So IBM needs to ensure they deliver the same well crafted message around Websphere as they did around AIX. While they can talk about entry level app serving around Gluecode, this isn't about small-medium business — it's about enterprise messaging.
• IBM is well versed in the game of Apache licensed code.  The licensing discussion is nicely encapsulated here: "The rationale for Geronimo over JBoss was that it would be more open, less vulnerable to the whims of its owner vendor. Instead, even though IBM haven't bought ownership of the Geronimo code, they do own the core developers. And every contribution made by third parties in the OSS codebase ends up benefiting the IBM distro. That is the price of the BSD license: you don't need to publish your additions, but everyone else has the same right. Which is precisely why (L)GPL makes so much sense for startups trying to retain control of their software. MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are good for universal adoption, but not retaining control of "strategic" technologies."
• Marc Fleury's commentary is to be expected, but I think he misses a few things:
  • IBM has been using open source as a business tool for 7 years at this point since joining the Apache community. They have a lot of experience here, building over time, from Apache involvement, to Linux, to their own Eclipse strategy.
  • Marc says IBM wants to kill JBoss.  IBM is far more interested in account control and the customer relationship than they are in the competition. The community may have strong opinions about the relative merits of Geronimo and JBoss, but the average CIO reads the news. They now have reason to pause when they look for a replacement for expensive Websphere licenses using scaled out multimachine solutions, instead of simply exploring JBoss, or Microsoft's embedded solution. While Gartner says JBoss is maturing, IBM is loudly doing something with Gluecode, so the careful CIO will look at both — and customers will ask them in to discuss things and the conversation can begin, if indeed it's not merely a continuation of an existing conversation. You sometimes need to perturb the message of your competitors to begin the conversation with your customers. Through the acquisition they can perturb the message of Sun, BEA, JBoss, and Microsoft all at once. It's a bold enough move, all the existing CIO customer base is probably calling their IBM account execs to explain it to them.
  • "While we are focused on improving developer productivity with our work on simplifying Enterprise Java at the EJB3 standards level and in our own JEMS product suite, IBM's announcement adds complexity for their customers and partners, not simplicity." Don't misunderstand the feet on the street power IBM applies around "industry standards" and the number of touch points for influence they have across the plethora of related consortia and standards efforts. Even if you understand the power of this, you won't have enough people in a company the size of JBoss to keep up. IBM will bury working groups in virtual paper. Don't forget your partners have their own agendas and when it comes to standards, IBM remains one of the few companies that genuinely uses its reach to participate rather than issue press releases about why some effort isn't important.  In the standards arena, participation equals influence.
  • "If evolution has anything to teach us, it is that hostile environments accelerate mutations and natural selection favors the fittest organisms. We are the leaner, faster party, with the true professional open source community base." Marc's confidense is admirable. He might forget, however, that lots of agile species die while figuring out the environment. IBM isn't a dinosaur, it's an elephant, and elephants and their evolutionary kin have been around a long time and learned to dance.

The risks of embedding a GPL licensed JBoss would be higher (though probably not insurmountable.) So Marc probably didn't get an offer.   

But Matt Asay's blogging of the acquisition takes us into a slightly different view of the space.  As he correctly points out, a driver for acquisitions is expertise. This is why one might buy rather than participate. IBM certainly has that level of the game figured out, as seen in their participation around Apache, Linux, and the development of Eclipse. Websphere integration (and Eclipse integration) can more easily be done when you employ the community leaders.  But it gets better: think Harmony.

Stephen O'Grady's summary on Harmony is a good summary pulling together the relevant posts across the discussion (including Miguel de Icaza's mono-coloured experiences).  But with Gier Magnusson as a central figure in Harmony now at IBM through the Gluecode acquisition, and the fact that IBM has a JVM that could be licensed as open source, and they have the testing resources to solve any compatibility concerns, it makes the discussion more interesting in the never ending influence games around Java.

Comments

[Sheygets Goyishekop]

Aaaah, yes. Wonderful.

I don't mean the content -- it's fine, but I can think about it better when I read it, and we can all read several times faster than we can listen. (Time it with a column of newsprint if you don't believe me.)

It's just that I love hearing your dulcet tones. "Hey! That's Stephe Walli! "

And where'd you get the Chipmunks?

As an intellectual aside, hostile environments don't change mutation rates at all. Not even in bacteria, which is what got Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck perfectly good Nobel Prizes in 1969. The Luria-Delbruck fluctuation test both kicked off the whole field of molecular biology and underscored the fact that natural selection only acts on preexisting variation.

This is true for software, too, which is exactly why, claims I, the cathedral sucks and the bazaar rules.

An equally apposite evolutionary principle here -- helped along by the fact that it, too, is true -- is Sir R. A. Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection:

"The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time."

Like F=ma, this is a qualitatively interesting, quantitative statement.

Fisher, in case you're not a math power user either, invented stuff like "variance" and "heritability" on his way to founding Theoretical Population Genetics. (TPG is to Evolution as Statistical Mechanics is to Thermodynamics.)

Would that someone were studying the evolution of software. No, I do not mean the kinds of stuff you buy at Barnes and Noble or SoftPro Books.

[Randall Shimizu]

I agree Gluecode is acquistion is good all around for IBM. Gluecode gives IBM the momentum to blunt Jboss and mysql. Now that the SE Wepshere version is open sourced it gives them a strong foothold in the opensource market.

[Randall Shimizu]

I agree Gluecode is acquistion is good all around for IBM. Gluecode gives IBM the momentum to blunt Jboss and mysql. Now that the SE Wepshere version is open sourced it gives them a strong foothold in the opensource market.