Once More unto the Breach

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. 

SAP and the Creature of Caerbannog at OSBC

In early January I posted a view of why I thought SAP has a good business understanding of open source software despite Shai Agassi's comments in the late Fall, offering that what they really need is a good PR strategy.  Now I'm not so sure.  Indeed, I begin to suspect that the executive sponsor of the SAPDB work has clearly left the company.   That Matt Asay chose to remind us of the Creature of Caerbannog from Monty Python's Holy Grail in his opening remarks on Day 1 is ironically fitting. 

Peter Graf, Vice-president product marketing of SAP kicked off Day 2 at OSBC with a keynote on Open Source and Open Models.  To summarize:

• SAP loves open source software and participates in many communities.  [The MySQL relationship is mentioned amongst all the other dozen or so, but without special significance despite what must have been to their credit a considerable investment of money and resources.]
• Geoff Moore has written a new book, and SAP is interpreting it the following way.
• The technology world goes through waves of consolidation, and is going through one right now. [I think he's bending a number of models to his own discursive needs here.]
• The current wave of application consolidation will be on the SAP platform.  [There's a shocker for the audience.]
  

And here's the kicker ....

• Open source software applications that haven't matured fast enough (subtext: Compiere, SugarCRM, OpenMFG) will not survive the consolidation.  [Thank God we'll have SAP.]
• SAP really cares about "open models" and the SAP model of collaboration on their platform will allow people to share their solutions.  [Herr Graf needs to go read the previous post on the difference between standards that benefit customers and vendor specifications that benefit the vendor's own ecosystem, and hopefully understand that at this point in history his customers aren't sheep.]

Of course, SAP thinks mature projects like Linux will survive.  Very convenient, as SAP gets the complement value of a less expensive Linux/x86 platform to reduce the overall solution cost to customers buying an expensive R3 world.  And I'm sure MySQL is sufficiently mature to survive in SAP's opinion, as SAP once again gets the complement value of a less expensive database to reduce the overall solution cost without an Oracle/DB2/SQL Server tax.  But certainly not those immature projects with "no customers."  Odd really considering the growing number of marque customers those immature projects are claiming. 

My frustration with it all is SAP has such an opportunity to wildly and boldly engage to the benefit of customers as IBM and Sun have done. (I've pointed out other examples we all love to talk about that are also missing huge opportunities with customers.) 

Attendees didn't pay $1500 to hear an ad for SAP.  This SAP rhetoric is positively ancient.  Indeed it sounds like Oracle several years ago as they strongly sung the praises of open source software like Linux, while pointing out all the problems with open source software like MySQL, Postgres, and BerkeleyDB .... Oh. Right.

The press have captured this as well.  One of the better bits is Dan Farber's blog post, and of course the Register is always a fun read.

Monty Python's Holy Grail [scene 21]

[text and photo from http://www.intriguing.com/mp/holygrail.asp#scripts]
TIM:  Behold the cave of Caerbannog!
ARTHUR:  Right!  Keep me covered.
GALAHAD:  What with?
ARTHUR:  W-- just keep me covered.
TIM:  Too late!
    [dramatic chord]
ARTHUR:  What?
TIM:  There he is!
ARTHUR:  Where?
TIM:  There!
ARTHUR:  What, behind the rabbit?
TIM:  It is the rabbit!
ARTHUR:  You silly sod!
TIM:  What?
ARTHUR:  You got us all worked up!
TIM:  Well, that's no ordinary rabbit.
ARTHUR:  Ohh.
TIM:  That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes
    on.
ROBIN:  You tit!  I soiled my armor I was so scared!
TIM:  Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide; it's a killer!
GALAHAD:  Get stuffed!
TIM:  He'll do you up a treat mate!
....

Standards and Open Source Software at OSBC

I participated on a panel on the relationships between standards and open source software at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday, along with Bob Sutor (IBM), Tim Bray (Sun), Jason Matusow (Microsoft), and moderated by Andy Updegrove (Gesmer-Updegrove). (There are a few photos in a collection here, courtesy of Sun's OpenSolaris Community Manager, Jim Grisanzio.) I want to capture my notes on the primary economic relationships here.

When a market begins to mature, there comes a point when the incumbent vendor begins to over deliver functionality to their customers, faster than the customer can absorb it (and therefore the customer doesn't want to pay for it).  The technology space is mature enough at that point that the best integrated solution is no longer seen as the most valuable solution by the customer, and the technology space can componentize around a set of relevant standards. 

Customers want such standards, because they feel it will give them better choice.  The incumbent's competitors are only to happy to define standards to crack open the market away from the incumbent.  This is all pretty much straight out of Christensen's Innovator's Solution, with some personal observations based on past experience. 

This is where open source becomes relevant to the standards process.  Around what do the competitors choose to build a standard?  I would argue they choose a body of technology around which they have already collaborated for a period of time in the industry.  Because the collaboration has been happening, the vendors have existing practise and experience to determine what works or not.  The vendor marketing organizations even likely have certain "customers" they can build case studies around, because of various non-vendor participants in the collaborative space. 

• So when Digital Equipment Corp began over delivering on VAX/VMS faster than customers could absorb the new innovations, their competitors chose a large collaborative research project called UNIX that had existed for years to begin the standards base. 
• TCP/IP won over ISO OSI networking initiatives because the code base existed out of the DARPA and IETF experience. ("Rough consensus and running code.")
• In the content management world we're seeing this play out again as different vendors over deliver in the different content management spaces, and standards are appearing, rapidly adopted from the open source projects around which they have formed. 

And we're seeing this play out around Microsoft Office and the rise of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.  Microsoft has over delivered to the bulk of their Office customers.  The customers are frustrated.  And Microsoft's competitors rallied around the OpenOffice project to act as a base from which to define ODF.  The next release of OpenOffice supported ODF. 

The interesting thing is the dilemma the incumbent faces.  They have to continue to deliver new product releases with new features and functions.  That's what Wall Street rewards them for doing.  And the incumbent is even brilliantly creating new innovations in the space and could be working feverishly to deliver them.  But the bulk of their customers are over served.  They can't eat the last round of innovations.  Why would they want to pay for the next round?  Remember, economically, innovation is a supply side activity — customers just want to buy solutions and they don't want to buy things they don't use regardless of how innovative they might indeed be.

So vendors use collaboratively developed technology bases (today often defined as open source projects) to act as a base for new standards work. 

Another part of the discussion that came out was around the purpose of standards.  Unfortunately this part of the discussion happened towards the end of the panel and I think parts of it were lost.

Standards exist to enable and encourage multiple implementations, regardless of the forum in which they are created.  It benefits the consumer.  Likewise, a vendor specification regardless of whether it has gone through a formal standards or consortia forum exists to encourage multiple add-ons to a single implementation, i.e. it benefits the supplier.  I have never liked the term de facto standard — it is really a de facto technology.  So in our case above, it is the incumbent's technology that is dominant in a market space. 

So a successful standard (measured economically) has many implementations.  A failed standard is one for which there is only one implementation.  In the ODF case, there are already a number of product implementations available, derived from the OpenOffice code base. In the Microsoft Office XML standards work underway at ECMA International, there is only the yet to be shipped Microsoft Office 12 product. 

Jason (rightly) called me out on this rather presumptuous observation, but in his explanation I thought I heard him say that Microsoft is defining the new Microsoft Office standard indeed to encourage multiple implementations, AND to encourage developers to innovate around the Microsoft Office document formats.  In the first case, it would be bad business to encourage multiple implementations of a product that is responsible for 50% of the revenue stream.  In the latter case, it's just another vendor specification  to benefit the vendor regardless of the standards imprimatur.

All in all a good panel discussion (despite Tim's comments that it could have been more exciting).  I look forward to continuing the debate, and would love people to comment with other examples of where a collaborative project has acted as the base of a new standards effort.