In explaining why the decision from OpenOffice.org took longer than Roberto & team expected, Sun’s Simon Phipps (Chief Open Source Officer) explained:

“…by using the GPL rather than the LGPL for your contribution, it was necessary for Sun’s legal team to conduct an extensive discussion about the implications of distributing it with OpenOffice.org (which as you know is licensed under LGPL).”

Simon’s quote got me thinking about my WAS Community Edition (WAS CE) days. Mixing different licenses in a project isn’t always so clear cut. Even when working with similar licenses, when a large commercial vendor (i.e. a large litigation target) is involved, they tend to be cautious, and want to protect their IP, investment and guard against litigation.

IBM has a rigorous process before we use, and hence distribute, open source software (OSS) code of any license inside an IBM product. Even with WAS CE, which is built with Apache Geronimo, an ASF licensed product, we had to validate that the code was appropriately licensed and that copyrights were being respected. On more than one occasion the WAS CE development team found code that was iffy from a copyright standpoint. The team rewrote the code and contributed it to the Geronimo project.

At the time, I’d suggested we talk about IBM’s OSS usage approval process as a customer value point. What good is indemnity if your OSS vendor doesn’t have procedures which enable them to give IP assurances with confidence? Saying “we own all the IP, so don’t worry” isn’t always the full answer. This is especially true for IP that was contributed by a 3rd party.

For example, let’s say I get some piece of code from the Linux kernel and use it in a personal application for so long that I forget that it’s not actually my IP, but something I copied. Then, I submit some of “my” code, including the IP that I don’t really own, into, for e.g., OpenOffice.org and grant openOffice.org joint copyrights to “my” code. Now what?

Regardless of what license I attached to “my” code that I contributed, there is a potential risk to the openOffice.org project, and Sun (as it distributes the commercial StarOffice distro). What if I contributed someone else’s copyrighted code knowingly? What happens when a larger OSS project is actually built with sub-projects from different communities that aren’t under the stewardship of the larger OSS project?

[Note I'm only using Sun/OpenOffice as an example, you can substitute IBM/Apache Geronimo if you like.]

Yes, the code scanning & checking of IP ownership is in place to protect the vendor, and fortuitously, the OSS project. But shouldn’t customers know the level of “background checks” in place before accepting “indemnity protection”? Why don’t we hear about these “background checks” more often from OSS vendors? Is it because OSS vendors providing indemnity don’t do the checks, or because the only way for a vendor to 100% guard against IP indemnity claims is to go buy an insurance policy.

[Note: We didn't include "IP background checks" in our WAS CE customer marketing because the legal team didn't want us to give customers a false sense of security as checks can always miss something. Yeah, the legal team is more cautious as a result of SCO, which is to be expected. But as the example of SCO shows, IP violation claims will almost always hit the largest wallet in the project-vendor-customer chain, so customers are often in the clear regardless of indemnity clauses.]

It would be interesting to hear whether Sun does any checking on 3rd party IP contributed to OpenOffice (and their other OSS projects). What about OSS vendors like Red Hat or OpenLogic?

BTW, please read my disclaimer here.

Comments

Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Not sure if the author, Henry Chesbrough mentioned that IBM made significantly more than $100m/yr in revenue as a result of its Linux investments, whether through increased hardware or services sales. And, we continued to drive revenue to AIX. This last point isn’t often covered, but the AIX business didn’t die.

Very few customers take a one-size-fits-all approach to their IT needs. So, yes, you may need AIX or Solaris or a System z for some of your applications. But you’ll also need some RHEL, SLES or Windows for other parts of your infrastructure.

Customers want choice. So when a new option in a given software category becomes available that saves money, time, is easier to use, etc., customers will pay attention. If IBM had tried to ignore Linux, customers would have satisfied their curiosity (initially) and desire for Linux with another vendor. At the same time, these customers wanted to know how Linux fits into their current infrastructure (i.e. technology integration & skills reuse). Having an answer which included AIX and other parts of IBM’s offerings helped. Far from being a hindrance (i.e. related products that needed to be protected at all costs), these related products gave IBM the ability to speak to customer needs for the given project and other projects with different needs.

The same thing is happening in the application server space. When JBoss started popping up on customer’s radars, the traditional app server vendors didn’t pay attention (maybe to the degree they should have – depending on who you ask). But, customers satisfied their needs none the less and JBoss downloads and revenue grew.

Lucky for IBM, JBoss started out by targeting customers from other application server vendors. That’s when we made the move to purchase Gluecode Software Co. (a key member of the Geronimo community) and throw our support behind the Apache Geronimo open source application server. We delivered a paid support offering for Geronimo. We also came out with WAS Community Edition (WAS CE), a free product built on Geronimo that developers, customers, and partners could use without support or with paid support.

At the end of the day, customers want choice. And while the WebSphere Application Server (WAS) portfolio is broad, it didn’t give customers a free, light-weight and open source offering, some of the things that were attracting attention to JBoss. We filled that portfolio gap and our revenue continues to surpass market rates. Ensuring a strong tie between these offerings and the rest of the WebSphere portfolio has been a tremendous selling point because customers have different needs for different projects and want to take advantage of the skills they have.

Do we see JBoss in more deals? Yep. Do we lose some? Sure, that’s the software business for you. Do we win a lot more than we would have if we didn’t have the Geronimo Support or WAS CE? Absolutely.

Do you have a point that summarizes this long post? Yeah, thanks for asking: Don’t view open source competition as something to ignore. Get into the ‘game’, give customers the choice they seek and explore how your higher-value offerings (the ones you think you need to protect) can be an asset to your business.

Should we have made the move to support Geronimo earlier? Yeah. But our WAS revenue was growing so fast and our sales teams weren’t running into open source competition, so maybe we became a little complacent. It happens. I have one possible explanation for why, but that’s for another post. BTW, please read my disclaimer here.

[The pic is from Flickr user jawcey]

Comments

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

“insane complexity of technology is leading companies to spend 75% to 80% of IT budgets simply maintaining the systems they have already.”

The 75%-80% figure is a little higher than the 60%-70% figure I’d seen in customer research we did a few years back. But the issue I have with the quote is the suggestion that spending on systems you have already is a waste of money or time.

Very few companies have the luxury of implementing greenfield applications.

Most of the time, your new app has to integrate with a large number of your old apps. And that may require some tweaks to your old apps. Or maybe your company changed or added a new business process, so you’ll need to make some modifications to your existing apps. That’s not waste, that’s a normal business expense.

The alternative would be to throw out the existing app that needs to be modified and start again; to me, that’s waste.

If you tell me that SOA or loosely coupled web services are the answer. I’ll agree, to a a certain degree. But now, instead of modifying existing app “XYZ”, you’re going to modify existing component/service “YZA”.

On the topic of innovation, here’s a good article from Business Review Online about customers using Open Source as a means to drive innovation. Interesting that OpenLogic is seeing customers that either want to save money or open up technical innovation. I’m surprised that customers don’t want to do both.

We found that customers that adopted Apache Geronimo (support from IBM) or WAS Community Edition (WAS CE) were seeking to save money and build a platform that allowed their developers to write and deploy applications faster and with more flexibility.

Often, they were using Apache Geronimo or WAS CE for a specific project that needed to get rolled out ASAP. But, these customers cared about how “this stuff will work with the stuff I already have“. They wanted to know what options they had if the app transformed from “a quick and dirty request to something that users relied on, would be less productive without and wanted more out of“. Cost savings, a platform for innovation and future flexibility and choice were all considerations.

Most IT folks know that applications seldom fade away quickly, they just get integrated and maintained with all the other “legacy stuff“.

The pic is from A.M. Kuchling over at Flickr

Comments

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

I’d wholeheartedly agree. I’d like to add “or within the open source group of a traditional software company”. (Yeah, Matt’s advice is snappier).

Here’s why I suggest the addition:

Take a look at this job posting for Director of Product Marketing at SocialText which I found on Roberto Galoppini’s blog. The only requirement which appears to be a skill that you’ll build more easily at an open source pure-play than a traditional software vendor is “Holistic understanding of commercial open source software“. If you’re in a division at IBM, Oracle or Sun that is leveraging the value of open source, you’ll get this experience. It doesn’t hurt to play with open source on evenings or weekends.

Next, the following comment from Elias Torres. Elias is an IBMer (whom I’ve never met, but know of because I use his Firefox extension) who worked on Lotus Ventura. Elias is an IBMer working on the Apache Roller open source project and on the team using Roller within Ventura (a commercial IBM product). His experience balancing the needs of the community with the needs of his employer are going to be a valuable asset for Elias I’m sure.

“This is my first IBM product experience and it has been a very positive one so far, but we can talk about that later. The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding but brings with it a great sense of responsibility. We are very serious about Roller and are committed to giving back as much as we can.”

Lastly, I can speak from personal experience with trying to get a product (WAS Community Edition, aka WAS CE) based on open source technology (Apache Geronimo) out the door at IBM.

Being the WAS CE product manager was the best job I’ve had at IBM. Even though IBM had a lot of experience with open source at the time, a lot of what we did with WAS CE was new territory. Using an open source business model of paid support around a free product was completely new. To say we had some internal angst from other groups at IBM would be an understatement. But the angst wasn’t because we were trying an open source business model. It was because we were doing something that wasn’t business as usual. We got through these challenges with some help from executives that gorked the value of WAS CE to the WebSphere portfolio.

The many meetings to explain what we’re doing and how it fits with a given IBM product’s plans also helped. There was, and remains, plenty of day-to-day work to ensure we did/do the right things in the Geronimo community, for WAS CE customers/partners and for our broader WebSphere & IBM customers/partners. Did we make some tradeoffs to balance all three interests? Definitely. Did we usually pick the business as usual route? Nope. Did knowing the business as usual route help? Absolutely. Was it easy? Nope. Was it fun? Heck ya!

I believe that the open source business model will continue to find a home inside more and more traditional software vendors. As this occurs, folks who have experience with open source software and traditional software are going to be very valuable. Folks that can walk the delicate tightrope between the ideologies of both camps will be even more indispensable.

Yes, I know that sounds like a self serving statement

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

“Open-source software’s transparent nature and low-cost will make it more popular among developing countries such as China and India (see India State: Linux In, MS Out). Marten Mickos, CEO of open-source database company MySQL, says the fast-growing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will be breeding grounds in 2007 for interesting open source startups because of the large market and talent. “China and India are so large together, like they have become the physical goods factories of the world, the same will happen with open source,” Mr. Allison says”

While I hope that Falguni’s prediction materializes, a conversation with my cousin in India a few days ago made me wonder for a second.

My cousin works as an IT Admin for a very large American bank with operations in India. His group develops and manages applications, (along with the related OSes and hardware) for use in the bank’s Indian operations. This isn’t an outsourcing operation. I figured they’d be using lots of open source like LAMP, Tomcat or Geronimo to keep costs down. They weren’t. They’re using a lot of Microsoft technology. When I asked why they weren’t using Linux, he asked about how secure Linux and open source in general was. To be honest I was a little surprised that (1) they weren’t using more open source products and (2) he questioned the security of Linux vs. Windows. Note, this is based on a sample size of 1 (well 2 because I’ve heard similar things from another cousin when I asked about Java or PHP vs. .NET, and MySQL vs. Oracle usage), so take it with several grains of salt.

Upon reflection, I shouldn’t have been too surprised:

1] I’ve heard about how important MCSE and other Microsoft certification is in India

2] Microsoft continues to invest heavily in India. Microsoft also benefits from Indian outsourcing companies working for overseas customers with investments in Microsoft technology. If the overseas customer is outsourcing work on Microsoft technology, then Indian outsourcing firms need employees with Microsoft skills.

3] I came across this post from Christopher Blizzard who writes:

.. students who are in schools to which we suggest that they get involved in open source software in India often ask “how will doing work in open source software help me get a job?”

Remember that many of these students are becoming the highest earners in their (extended) family by securing an IT job. This sometimes means that they are, wholly or in part, supporting their parents and siblings through these IT jobs. As a result, they’re very focused on taking steps that will directly result in “a good job with a good company“. Why contribute to an open source project when I can be studying, (which is what classmates are doing)? Sure contributing open source code is good experience, but good exam results often play a larger role in securing a job in India. And yes, one can argue that if you contribute a lot to, say, kernel.org, you may get a job with a commercial Linux distro vendor, but that’s an edge case scenario today.

Maybe the increasing penetration of open source in North America & Europe will drive the need for more open source skills within Indian outsourcing companies. As a result, students will have an incentive to work on open source projects while in school. As this happens, some will surely decide to found an open source-based venture, or decide that such a venture is “a good job with a good company“. It’s also good to see commercial open source vendors like Red Hat hiring more Indian staff. And from a personal standpoint, we have a sizable team of IBM India employees working on Geronimo & WAS CE development & support. Oh, and let’s not forget about the buzz from Indian Government agencies adopting Linux, which should drive more interest for working on open source projects.

The future is definitely bright for open source innovation from India and other emerging countries, but there’s plenty of work to be done yetit’s going to be a fun ride indeed!

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Suggestion: First, I’ve mailed the WAS CE product team asking for a short developerWorks article to address this configuration question. In the interim, you should know:

1. From the WAS CE docs:

“Database managers are integrated with the server as J2EE resource adapters implemented from the Tranql open source project. For example, you can integrate any database manager that supplies a compliant JDBC driver in a non-XA configuration by deploying tranql-connector-1.1.rar with a properly configured deployment plan. See the EMPDemo for an example.”

2. Next, start with this developerWorks article titled “Three ways to connect a database to a Geronimo application server“.

The article itself is old, and refers to older versions of files etc. But the principles and steps should still work and the article is totally focused on using MySQL.

Use this article to get familiar with the concepts, but then use the sample application I mention below. It contains more recent files (i.e. deployment plan) that you can edit and use for your purposes.

Also, remember that WAS CE is built with Apache Geronimo, so even though this is a Geronimo-based article, a WAS CE-based article would read the same.

3. Now, use the EMPDemo sample application to see examples of configuring JDBC drivers with WAS CE.

While the sample shows how to access Derby/Cloudscape, MS SQL Server and Oracle, there is a sample MySQL plan for your use. Get the sample files from IBM here (IBM ID required) or here (from the IBM WAS CE download site at Sourceforge).

I’ll update this post when I hear back from the WAS CE product team. There may actually be a recent document on using MySQL with WAS CE, but I wasn’t able to find it quickly.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Thought I’d try and clear up some of the confusion..

This shouldn’t be an “is A better than B?” discussion.

WAS CE is built using an open source product, Apache Geronimo. Like Apache Geronimo, WAS CE is free to download and use, and you can build it yourself from open source code. Unlike Apache Geronimo, WAS CE however does not carry an OSI-approved license, and as such, is not an open source product. WAS CE is built on an open source product. Developers are using WAS CE and Apache Geronimo; it all depends on what you’re need/comfort is.

If you want the newest stuff right away, then you’ll use Geronimo. If you want predictable release cycles, then WAS CE will fit the bill. If you want to modify the source code, fix bugs yourself or create a derivative work, then pick Geronimo. If you want integration with other IBM products and broad platform/database support, then take a peak at WAS CE. Both are free, or optionally, supported for a fee through IBM and others, so have at it!

From a technical standpoint the WAS CE team takes Geronimo and

Removes/Replaces:

• Jetty: because Geronimo comes in two flavors, one with Jetty as the JSP/Servlet engine, and the other with Tomcat as the JSP/Servlet engine. WAS CE only supports Tomcat.
• Apache Derby: Derby is used as an internal data store for Geronimo, but is also exposed so that users can write their application data into Derby without having to get another database or do the integration. IBM Cloudscape is IBM’s free and supported version of Derby. I’m not the Derby/Cloudscape expert, but from what I remember, they are identical at the bits/bytes level. In any case, you get Cloudscape with WAS CE mainly so IBM can provide you support for the database. If you buy support for WAS CE, you automatically get free support for the copy of Cloudscape that comes with WAS CE; no separate contract, no separate charges.
• Apache Directory Server: Mainly because users told us early on that they already have a company mandated’ directory server. So why give them something very few are going to need/use (we do support Apache DS though).
• Servicemix: When we first made this decision it was because customers and partners had told us to be careful to introduce technology in WAS CE that was (1) fully baked and (2) was supported in the rest of the WebSphere Application Server family of products. Servicemix didn’t fit the bill at the time. This one may change with future releases of WAS CE, but don’t quote me though as I don’t have a say anymore

Adds:

• Integration: Hooks into other IBM products like Rational Application Developer, WebSphere MQ etc.
• Growth Path: migration path from WAS CE to the rest of the WebSphere Application Server family of products.
• Bundled IBM JDK: or you can download WAS CE without a JDK. You can also use the Sun JDK. (More here)
• Platform Support: Support for Red Hat RHEL, Novell SLES, Red Flag Data Center, Fedora, Mandriva, AIX, Solaris, Windows XP & 2003. (More here) NOTE: Geronimo has different binaries for Windows & Unix (including Linux & Mac OS X), but does not make an explicit OS support statement. You can try using it with any operating system you like, if it doesn’t work, try the Geronimo mailing list for help. Or if you have paid for support, see which operating systems your support provider supports.
• JDBC Drivers: Bundles JDBC drivers for Oracle, DB2, MySQL and MS SQL Server to give you broad DB support (More here)
• Directory Support: Support for Apache Directory Server, IBM Tivoli Directory Server, MS Active Directory, OpenLDAP Server. (More here)
• IBM documentation: Docs, samples and plenty of WAS CE resources on developerWorks

As you may be able to tell, there are few major technical differences between Geronimo & WAS CE. We made the decision early on to stay as close to Geronimo as we could and still be able to give IBM customers what they expect out of an IBM product. The general WAS CE vision is to do as much work as we can out in the Geronimo community. In doing this, Geronimo users and WAS CE users get to benefit from the new features etc. (like we did with the console & Eclipse plug-in).

Hope this helped some of you out. If you have questions, just leave a comment or drop a line at savioTHIRTEEN (use the number instead of the word) at gmail.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

“(while Red Hat) really haven’t gotten in the way”"the R&D really hasn’t benefited from a huge investment, which I was hoping for and was the main reason I went to Red Hat“

[UPDATED 2006-11-27: Eweek has a longer article on the Fleury interview here]

Well, if Marc was looking for an R&D bump, he should have calculated how much more Red Hat spends on SG&A (sales, marketing & administrative) vs. R&D compared to Oracle or other large IT vendors.

If Marc had done this, he’d have thought twice about Oracle.

But maybe he’ll get to experience that also

While JBoss and Red Hat feel each other out and Marc goes to the Red Hat executive team with his tin cup for R&D, the WAS CE team has been making significant strides against JBoss.

According to an Evans Developer Study of Eclipse users released in the summer, WAS CE usage with Eclipse grew from 0% in 2005 to 16%, compared to a growth of 13% to 19% for JBoss.

That’s nearly 3x faster growth for WAS CE than for JBoss.

Oh, and Apache Geronimo usage by Eclipse users grew from 1% use in 2005 to 14%, not bad eh?

Combined, 30% of developers using Eclipse said they developed against Geronimo/WAS CE compared to 19% for JBoss.

Goes to show you what a true open community (Geronimo) and IBM’s R&D efforts (WAS CE) can team up to do together.

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

You’re correct that OSS is changing the game, but if the OSS community sticks to its vision of a 100% OSS world, in which commercial software is something your father used, then you’re going to see aggressive moves by vendors like Oracle & Microsoft bent on protecting their turf. The truth is that the future of the software market lies in the mutual existence of the OSS & commercial software business models. Neither is going away anytime soon, or ever. So, if we accepted this outcome, and toned down the rhetoric, there would be a better chance of educating vendors like Microsoft & Oracle to the benefits of adding open source products into their product lines without poisoning the communities that develop said products.

At the end of the day, customers want high quality software, support, performance, reliability, scalability and availability for the best price. Sometimes OSS will be the answer for the project. Other times it will be a commercial product. It comes down to customer choice.

One can argue that customers are better off with OSS because they can see the code and aren’t locked-in. However, I think that’s a simplistic view, and for the average customer, one that isn’t supported in practice and especially since mature OSS vendors inevitably start looking very much like mature commercial vendors.

Take a look at what IBM WebSphere did with our support for Apache Geronimo, and building an IBM product based on Geronimo. Not only has the WebSphere Application Server revenue growth remained healthy compared to our commercial & open source competition, we’ve been able to truly get involved and help the Geronimo community innovate. Customers have been big winners here (well, so have we!).

There’s a lesson for Microsoft & Oracle in the success of IBM WebSphere & WAS Community Editionif they’d only peer out from under the bed.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

It’s a great start and the team should be commended on releasing the results even though it highlights areas where Geronimo performance needs some work, specifically, in the area of pass-by-value EJB primitives.

This gap is being addressed in Geronimo 1.2, so it’ll be interesting to see the performance test for 1.2.

One thing to point out: The “Performance Target (PT)” number represents, if I read correctly, the best performance from commercial & OSS alternatives for the given test case.

So, if JBoss performs best at Test A1, then, the PT target for A1 is defined by the JBoss score.

If WebSphere performs best for Test A2, then the PT target for A2 would be defined by the WebSphere score and so on.

This sounds like a much better evaluation for the Geronimo team to determine which areas they need to work on to get to best-in-class performance.

Also, some question the approach of Geronimo being built using OSS components from various communities, vs. bringing all the projects under one roof (with a central control structurea la what JBoss is trying to do).

This view requires wrestling control of these related projects away from their individual communities, or the Geronimo community re-implementing code to replace the components from these related projects.

Both alternatives go against the modus operandi (i.e. peace & reuse) of true open source communities.

And hey, developing OSS components in separate, but related, communities seems to have worked out okay for Linux

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.