On Thursday August 9, ebizQ presented Mark Driver of Gartner discussing the relationship of open source software (OSS) to services oriented architecture (SOA). You can still listen to the webinar but you missed the chance to participate. So the purpose of this post is to provide a reprise of the key issues raised in the session. By the way, Red Hat sponsored the event and some of the questions were answered by Burr Sutter, Red Hat's director of product management, who was also on the panel.

Attendees wanted the panel to talk about the difference between OSS and open standards. One felt that participating in the SOA standards movement would provide his or her enterprise stronger investment protection than access to particular code, or the right to distribute it. Good point and it represents the different sides of the same coin.
-- OSS guarantees enterprises access to the code and the right to upgrade/improve that code even if the company or community that provided it goes out of business or disbands. For more details about our view of the OSS world, see the Features section under this tab and this taxonomy document in particular
-- While standards can provide a similar advantage, IT history shows us that standards are more about least-common-denominator functionality, not usually what an enterprise wants if the code is providing competitive advantage. But SOA standards are critical to intercompany activity such as supply chain management or CRM among business partners. If that is more important to your IT strategy than internal code that supports competitive advantage, working with the standards movement would be a better way to support IT community.

There tends to be such a standards movement in every industry. Of course, if you have the resources (who does these days), you can do both.

Another question was, “What's the driver for business to adopt OSS-based SOA?” These are two different questions really (and then I’ll try to put the answers together in the next paragraph). The drivers for the architecture are the ability to build utility-like computing for your enterprise or organization with benefits such as service level agreements, grid infrastructure for protection against “power outages,” unit-based metering of compute power and more. The drivers for the OSS development model are the protection against a company or organization disbanding as described above, faster bug fixes and other quality assurance facets, and less vendor lock-in.

In short, SOA is an architecture and OSS is a development model and the two together complement each other with benefits that do not overlap.

The $64,000 question was “Mission critical apps are often considered too important to put on OSS platforms. What are some of the arguments against that view? As I said in the session, the flip answer is “Google.” Both Burt and Mark went into more detail. I don’t believe anyone is peddling the canard that OSS is not ready for primetime anymore but if you hear it, consider all the companies and organizations that have already crossed over from a proprietary UNIX distribution to Linux. There are similar examples up and down the stack.

Overall it was a great session with another half dozen questions like the above. To “attend in arrears” and at least hear the answers directly, click on the Webinars tab on the upper left and then click on the Archived Webinars link. Look for the 8/9/2007 webinar titled “Optimizing Open Source and SOA Strategies.” You’ll have to sign up for the ebizQ Gold Club if you have not already; it’s free.

And if you still have a question you wished you’d been there to ask, do not hesitate to email me at dennis at ebizq-dot-net. And save the dates October 30-31 for ebizQ's two-day virtual conference on SOA In Action where we'll talk move about the convergence of OSS and SOA.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The two weeks before the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S. are a traditional slow news period. So the wings of the open source software (OSS) blogosphere are spending it getting all twisted in a knot over Microsoft again. This time the issue is Microsoft’s application to have two of its Shared Source licenses approved as compliant with Open Systems Initiative (OSI) rules related to the definition of OSS. The two Microsoft licenses are described here at the opensourcelegal.org web site along with the dozens of other available OSS licenses. Obviously I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the legal opinion but it looks pretty straightforward.

As the linked legal list illustrates, Sun, IBM and others have similar licenses. A similar list at the OSI (opensource.org) web site illustrates that IBM’s and Sun’s are already approved through the OSI process. So, why the fuss? Well because it’s Microsoft of course.

For starters, it’s probably best to stick to the actual OSI site to follow the discussion. Other blog entries pro and con on this subject do not necessarily accurately reflect what is being said at the official OSI discussion site.

At the OSI site, there’s a thread for each license. Microsoft in the persons of Jon Rosenberg (Director, Microsoft Source Program) and Bill Hilf (VP, Platform Strategy within Tools and Server group) has proposed, others have weighed in yeah or nay, and the Microsoft representatives have responded. With the exception of one Micro-basher, it’s all pretty civilized:
-- Microsoft explains why the licenses are similar to existing OSI licenses and why they are different and therefore needed.
o The PL is similar to BSD and Apache 2.0 but with stronger copyright clause according to Microsoft.
o The CL is similar to the Mozilla Public License but cleaner as to what is derived, they say.
-- Some genuine concerns are raised about
o wording (some call licenses such as Sun’s and IBM’s “vanity” licenses)
o OSS terminology (the implications of the terms viral and permissive)
o a desire to more clearly distinguish these licenses from others already approved (at least one supporter objects to it as to similar to other already approved licenses but recommends OSI approval simply because it gets Microsoft into the game)

Despite the impression that the blogosphere is giving, the one Micro-basher actually participating on the official site has some pretty weak objections. He or she objects to the term “shared source” among other things. Why the writer does not have the same objection to the terms “free software” competing with “open source software” is not clear (not even debatable in this context according to the Micro-basher). And of course, if Microsoft had used the term “open source…” instead of “shared source,” can you imagine the howl that would have caused from the Micro-bashers.

The OSI Micro-basher is even complaining about where Microsoft places the license text on its web site. Wow, what a stretch but Microsoft—in the spirit of community—has said it will consider segregating the texts.

Challenged to defend a weak discriminatory position, the Micro-basher instead introduced an old allegation. He or she implied that the ex-State-of-Massachusetts politician that tried to freeze Microsoft out of Massachusetts IT procurements using a 2003 planning group called the IT Commission, run by IBM, was forced out of state government somehow by Microsoft. Although it has nothing to do with OSS licensing, just for the record the politician resigned following Boston Globe stories about his expense report practices. (I am not commenting on whether the Globe stories were accurate or not.)

If like me you really want open choice, you quickly find that the tables have turned and this debate at the OSI site is just the latest example. A small portion of the OSS community is against choice (and against Microsoft for whatever reason) and the entire movement is in jeopardy of being tarred with that reputation. Microsoft under emerging new management is more for choice than the OSS community that started the push to choice originally. As I have written elsewhere, this change is happening because Microsoft is pragmatic not because it has fundamentally changed. Microsoft sees the IT industry moving away from any great dependence on software development models and towards software as a service. So it wants to reap the benefits of getting the OSS community to do a lot of its R&D, just as IBM, Sun and others already have.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) this week released the second and "last call" draft of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. Outside of the hard-core open source software (OSS) community, the AGPL has not received the same kind of attention as the FSF's GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3) released in June. There have been no Business Week or Forbes stories or Microbashing in the blogosphere.

But the AGPL may have more far-reaching effects on the entire IT community than the more heavily publicized GPL if it were widely accepted. That's because this is the ASP/SaaS-related FSF license. Here at O'Reilly is a timely explanation vis a vis Skype's recent problems but the concept applies to all mundane functionality SaaS-model companies as well.

Because SaaS is the software delivery model of the future just as OSS is the software development model of the future, the AGPL is actually more important than the GPL itself. The more SaaS-oriented startups depend on OSS the more likely they are to walk into this hornet's nest. The FSF itself says, "The GNU General Public License permits (developers to make) a modified version (of otherwise GPL-complaint software) and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public." The AGPL closes that loop.

That's probably why there is more internal OSS community bickering over it than there was over the GPL. Here is an article that describes two OSS gurus arguing about the subject years ago and here is a more recent example (one of the OSS gurus being the same).

Affero is (or was) a web server host in San Franciso that originally came up with the license in the early part of this decade with the help of the FSF and then turned over maintenance of the license to FSF. The simple intent of this version of AGPL is to make it consistent with version 3 of the GNU GPL but it is also opening up all the old wounds in the OSS community.

You can review the draft and provide your feedback at http://gplv3.fsf.org/agplv3-dd2-guide.html.

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The breaking news section below, Tony Baer to my left and Alex Fletcher to my right here on this Open Source Software in Action web page have covered the Citrix/Xen announcement pretty thoroughly.

I have been on the road with no time to write but a lot of drive time to think: $500 million? I fear the dot.com era is returning. The bet is on buzz not reality. In betting on virtualization, investors are paying no attention to the effects of functional convergence that is always occuring in the IT market (e.g., web servers into app servers during the dot.com era, word processors into office suites before that, virtualization BACK into operating systems in the next few years), Developrs are going to be distracted by the buzz and some real good ideas are going to get left on the cutting room floor.

Open source software (OSS) acceletrates this regularly occuring boom-bust cycle. Maybe that's a good thing. The IT market will get this bubble out of its system quicker.

(I will be reviewing this in detail from an investment perspective at Research 2.0 (see link to right) after the telltale SEC documentation is released.)

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One of the key tenets of the open source software (OSS) culture is the belief that working with a diverse developer set provides better quality software than working with a homogenous group of developers at a single company. That does not mean that you don’t still need a process to help assure that theoretically better quality and there’s the rub.

I was recently pointed at the web site, openQA.org, and hooked up with Patrick Lightbody, founder and prime mover of openQA. Patrick is also QA solutions product manager at Gomez, which provides on-demand services to measure and manage website and web application performance and the customer web experience from design and development, through deployment to production.

Quality assurance (QA) processes are as old as the software development process itself. Patrick points out that QA has the same kind of second-class-citizen characteristic in OSS development that it has always had in the proprietary software world. Except the problem is worse because there is no boss to say, “You will do the QA.” OpenQA aims at helping OSS communities and companies that by definition lack the benefit of “the boss” deciding who will do the QA.

OpenQA combines corporate sponsorship and a community approach much like an Apache for QA. It includes projects such as Selenium and its offshoots for rich dynamic web testing and smaller projects such as Watir, which stands for web application testing in Ruby. OpenQA software is distributed under an Apache-type license. Selenium was originally a Thoughtworks project designed to support its consulting practice. A few other contributors added Firefox plug-ins as recorders, some autocomplete features, breakpoints etc. to Selenium leading to Selenium IDE. Even some BEA QA specialists added some code. Given Patrick’s day job, not surprisingly the Gomez Reality Check on-demand service is OSS-based and the code has been placed back into the OpenQA community as Selenium RC.

There are other standalone OSS QA projects such as the PushToTest tools (pushtotest.com) distributed OSS under the Gnu General Public License version 2 (GPL V2), and the WebLoad community founded by established QA software provider, Radview. WebLoad is also licensed under the GPL.

It used to be in analyzing the health of the manufacturing industry in the U.S., you looked at the tool and die makers as leading indicators. I am thinking that the uptake of OpenQA and these other QA-oriented OSS projects may be a leading overall indicator of OSS success as the business model continues to mature in synch with Web 2.0 application development. If OSS is to be adopted by the large enterprises that spend the vast percentage of IT dollars, those enterprises are going to want assurances.

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You can’t call yourself an open source software (OSS) analyst unless you comment on a Utah Federal District Court ruling handed down on August 10. So here goes:

The judge ruled against SCO and in favor of Novell on a number of claims related to the original AT&T UNIX copyrights, circa 1972. IBM, Microsoft, and any company that runs Linux are also involved. But I don't get all the OSS blogosphere excitement. It’s the usual lineup of jumped-to conclusions: a new day has dawned, Linux is liberated, Microsoft is toast, and so forth. If only OSS adherents would spend more time developing OSS than blogging about Microsoft.

First of all, I didn’t see anything that decided whether IBM or anyone else inappropriately put any UNIX IP in Linux. If they did, the OSS blogosphere believes (and Novell has said--see their web site; it says there's a statement but it won't open for me) that Novell will do the right thing and indemnify (or whatever the right legal wording would be) IBM, and the OSS community from further action. But Novell’s shareholders would then have grounds for a class-action suit against Novell’s management for wasting its assets (or whatever the right legal wording would be).

And despite the cheering, all parties agreed that this ruling had nothing to do with patents, only the ownership of the UNIX copyrights. This has two implications to the OSS community:
1.) Microsoft’s claims that over 200 hundred of its patents have been violated by OSS distributors (and users) are totally unaffected by this ruling.
2.) Despite OSS philosophy, U.S. courts have no problems enforcing legitimate copyrights and patents when it comes to software.

Most important, the words “open source software” appear no where in the 102-page ruling that I could see. Apparently, judges like to keep their rulings narrow. This ruling hinged on some pretty narrow wording in two documents written in 1995 and 1996. This was the classic “lost on a technicality,” and would appear to have very little implications for the wider OSS community or business model.

Oh, and of course, the ruling itself will most likely be appealed for years and years.

When the dancing in the ether ends, nothing will have changed.

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I know I'm getting my blog-post and research points across about "open choice" between the Microsoft and the open source software (OSS) communiites when I get zinged from both sides. This blogger's comments ask what brand of grass I'm smoking because he perceived I said something positive about Microsoft. And this one thinks I'm in the tank for OSS.

I never thought I'd be accused of having drunk the OSS Kool-aid (and I assume when he talks about "sauce" that the second blogger didn't know me when I was in my 20s and 30s). He took sentences from my article out of context to make his point (I generally agree with his point but not with taking things out of context). So let me clarify my ideas about the fate of ESBs in case I was (as is likely) unclear.

I had written here (in the middle of a long research article): "ESBs are especially interesting because they may turn out to be the first category of software code that was OSS from the get go." That sentence was immediately followed by this sentence: "Progress, Cape Clear and Fiorano would argue with that characterization but my point is that OSS communities and sponsoring suppliers jumped in quickly with OSS ESBs."

It is the "jumped in quickly" that is key. I am a market researcher and what I look at are sales/market-dynamics trends. I believe the pure ESB play is going to trend like the web server opportunity did, bundled into stacks, with very little chance for a separate market to develop. This trend will occur, as did the web server trend, because of early movement into ESB functionality by the OSS community.

The large-supplier ESBs mentioned in the "sauce" blog post as a counterpoint to my finding actually prove my point. All are sold already as part of the supplier's stack (just as the Apache web server is also sold in IBM's and Oracle's stacks). BEA and IBM may have separate ESB prices on their price lists but that is not how they sell their ESBs. The ESB on Oracle's price list is bundled with the Integration Server (where it has been for years, only it was called Interconnect). And of course Sun's ESB is OSS already.

My article did not say that this means that OSS ESBs will be wildly successful in the market. Just the opposite, suppliers like Mulesource and Iona have to find ways to make sure their ESB efforts are not looked at as commodities. As discussed in my Talking to... series, wso2 is already beginning that process.

Understanding commoditization in IT market dynamics is not a matter of picking sides between Microsoft and OSS, or among large or small suppliers, or in favor of stacks or mix and match pureplay products. It's a matter of community and sponsor survival. If you enjoy the OSS games, you need to make sure there will be enough people around to keep your game going in the long term.

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I have shared my opinion on this blog (and provided more detailed research over in the Features section of the ebizQ Open Source tab) about the importance of building up the open source software (OSS) applications catalog. I'm talking industrial-strength enterprise applications. If OSS is to continue to grow as a development model for the largest IT suppliers and as an entree into the IT market for smaller suppliers that need a minimal barrier to entry, that growth will come in the applications/solutions area of the market.

That's because surely there will not be another OSS operating system and the OSS middleware stack is consolidating almost as rapidly as the so-called proprietary middleware stack. I say "so-called proprietary" because much of the stack from the large middleware suppliers is already OSS. And consolidation from a marketing perspective means there is no money to be made.

That leaves the solutions/applications space as the area of OSS growth potential.

Microsoft realizes that solutions will be the battlefield for the next 10 years and is gearing up to out-Eclipse Eclipse with the release of Longhorn as its next-generation platform and the next generation of Visual Studio. Microsoft plans for its partners--the melding of the Business Division partners that work with Great Plains/Navision/etc. and the group known as Windows Solutions Providers--to develop multiple solutions in every one of the theoretical 9,999 industry niches represented by the North American Industry Code (NAIC) at the four-digit level.

Some of these Microsoft solutions (or components or services if you prefer) will be standalone business intelligence and transactional applications. Others will be add-ons to Office and Dynamics. Some will be somewhat monolithic and others will be mash-ups. Some will be licensed in the sense we have come to know for the last 20 years and some will be available as a service (SaaS). Some of the SaaS offerings will be monetized by advertising, some by paying for related content (e.g., tax tables) and others by support arrangements. But all will be seamlessly architecturally compatible and interoperable. All 15,000-plus of them.

The OSS world by design and culture does not have such a unified launching pad for the thousands of industry-centric solutions that the market demands and the OSS community could provide. It has the LAMP stack but as I have illustrated elsewhere that stack is as often WAMP or LAOP. The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) could be the change agent that puts OSS on equal footing with the Microsoft ecosystem and helps preserve the open choice that many of us would like to see.

More than a LAMP stack or replacement, OSS needs a WebSphere or NetWeaver equivalent, a stack with more muscle than a low-level middleware layer and database access on which to base solutions. The OSA recognizes that need but is not quite ready to step up to the plate to provide it. But this week at LinuxWorld the OSA did come out into the on-deck circle. It introduced the first interoperability scheme in its ambitious Interoperability Roadmap. The OSA’s debut "prototype" includes specific standards and best practices for delivering a Common Customer View (CCV) across open applications. And the OSA has initiated projects in business process management, identity management, service level agreement action, and in other application middleware categories.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't expect any "Oh wow" open source software (OSS) news out of LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week (I'm always happy to be proven wrong on that count). The very nature of the OSS community precludes the "tight lid" on a story that was typical of the information technology (IT) market pre OSS. The one thing I did notice is the continued commitment to OSS by the company that is arguably now the largest company in IT, H-P. (I say arguably because you get into interesting research and analysis questions about what to count when it comes to IBM's new business-services strategy--the acquisition of Price Waterhouse Coopers a few years ago being an example.)

Among other things, HP announced at LinuxWorld 2007 the "open sourcing" of its Parallel Compositing Library. That's software that lets customers visualize complex data sets if they have the horsepower, according to HP. That's a further extension of HP's ambitious return to the software market under the umbrella of information lifecycle management to my investment research clients. That's OSS underlying big-ticket deals to everyone else.

Even though the OSS is "free," big IT suppliers are basing big-dollar deals on OSS and getting services revenue as add on. So sure, OSS community, take this high-performance computing software and make it even better. That'll mean more big deals for us.

It's not clear whether this OSS step was either a deal maker or deal breaker with two multi-million-dollar healthcare delivery sales also announced by HP today. It could have been neither. But it certainly didn't hurt given the medical centers' dedication to Linux and OSS. This is not a new marketintg technique but previously such an arrangement would come with cross-license and co-development strings between HP and the medical centers (or universities or oil companies, and so forth) that would tie down or up true innovation.

HP had some other OSS news today but that a $90 billion IT supplier is so committed to OSS is news enough.

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On Thursday August 9, 2007 at noon eastern U.S time ebizQ will present Mark Driver of Gartner discussing the relationship of open source software (OSS) to services oriented architecture (SOA). Everyone's invited and encouraged to participate with questions. Red Hat is sponsoring the event and Burr Sutter, Red Hat's director of product management, will also be on the panel.

I have written of and commented on the investment implications of SOA at Research 2.0 and elsewhere (the link is just one example; for more, google "Dennis Byron" filtered by "SOA").

Of course, I dig down into OSS here at ebizQ.

Mark ties the two together in a way users, investors and suppliers will want to hear. Why didn't I think of that?

To attend, click on the Webinars tab on the upper left and then push the button with Mark's picture beside it and the title "Optimizing Open Source and SOA Strategie" If you can't make it on Thursday, you miss out on asking a real industry expert your most pressing questions but the webinar will replay here on ebizQ for the foreseeable future.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is very little crossover between my research into publicly traded information technology (IT) companies from an investment perspective (see Research 2.0 button to right) and my analysis of open source software (OSS) culture, development and business issues. The way that the large IT companies co-opted the OSS movement is an example (and that lead to my research with ebizQ). Red Hat is another obvious exception, a large publicly traded enterprise tightly linked to OSS.

But other examples are few and far between. One of the few is SourceFire (NASDAQ: FIRE), which went public in March 2007 and which announced its first-half 2007 results yesterday. SourceFire is a great example of how OSS will remake the software market. It does not position itself to prospects or investors as an OSS company as so many of the inward looking Red Hat wannabees do but positions itself as a network security provider that oh-by-the-way uses OSS as an enabler. That make it more likely to be seen as a competitor to Symantec, McAfee and so forth and not just to OSS-positioned companies such as Untangle, which we talked about last month. (Untangle has an interesting positioning twist of its own versus Sourcefire, however, as explained in the highlighted link.).

I talked with John Newton, a founder of Alfresco (and Documentum) this week and he makes sure to position his new company the same way: function first, enabling technology second or even further down the list (watch this site for the upcoming "Talking to.." article with Alfresco or hit that RSS button up there on the right and see the article as soon as it is posted).

I warned in another post earlier this week how OSS infightling will scare away the investment community the way that the dot.com bubble bursting did seven years ago. In fact, and of course, the investment community is treading very lightly around OSS already, correctly fearing a repeat. Sourcefire wisely avoided any tendency to be labeled that way despite its relationship to the SNORT OSS community and its use of a good part of the LAMP stack. You have to search to find the SNORT link on SourceFire's web site. Sourcefire primarily monetizes its OSS-enabled technology as an appliance.

Oh there is one other small public company in Mountain View that comes to mind that craftily used OSS as an enabler without getting labelled and pigeon-holed as a niche software supplier. If you came across this blog through a search engine, you probably know what company I'm referring to.

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Internet News reported this week on IDC's latest take on open source software (OSS) adoption drivers and inhibitors. Analyst Matt Lawton previewed some factoids that I think he is going to present in more detail at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

According to the story, Matt is approaching his research into OSS adoption from exactly the right perspective--within the context of overall IT infrastructure and software adoption, rather than looking at OSS as a separate market the way some free-software-guru navel gazers think of the process.

My own research says most IT managers do not get up in the morning and say "I think I'll go buy some OSS today." They say,
-- "I need to accomplish such and such to make the business (or the IT infrastructure) run better.
-- "Will software help me do that or is there a device or appliance that targets my need better?
-- "If the answer is software, what software functionality will help me do that?
-- "Should I build it or buy it?
-- "If I buy it, should I license it perpetually or annually or should I buy it as a service?"
-- And so forth

OSS does not even make the list of filters until the build it or buy question for all intents and purposes. And even then it depends on whether the IT manager has already firmly committed to a specific development (e.g., Eclipse, VisualStudio) and/or deployment platform (e.g., WebSphere, WebLogic, NetWeaver, Red Hat's JBoss, SourceLab's SASH with Tomcat). Aside: most have not so committed (and even the ones that have move from enterprise to enterprise so frequently if they are good that no enterprise is really ALL BRAND A or ALL BRAND B.)

That's why the IDC study found (according to Internet News): "On an overall software basis... end users are most interested in product functionality, scalability and reliability. End users were less interested in having access to source code and the ability to modify and redistribute source code." Any one that has followed my research and analysis for the last 20 years knows the mantra: Functionality Rules! I have done or contributed to about 50 major pieces of statistically significant research among IT buyers in those 20 years and I cannot recall a survey where functionality was not the major adoption driver.

As for inhibitors, IDC apparently found some concern about patent issues when it comes to acquiring OSS according to the news story. Internet News probably feels leading with that issue will sell papers (they're right) but I doubt if any of the recent Microsoft hoopla was a major factor (the survey probably preceded the news). IT managers are more likely reflecting their inherent sense of fair play and their lawyer's desire that the company not be sued.

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