What Sun+MySQL says about open source business models
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It's not so much that there aren't workable business models around Open Source. But life is so much easier when those models can include pieces that people have to pay for as well.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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Ziff Davis - The company will launch an OpenSolaris site on Friday, but an open-source version of Sun's operating system is still a long way off.
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Investor's Business Daily - Some free open-source software aside, business software has been sold through licensing agreements for packaged products or via Web-based subscriptions -- until now.
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Pays $1bn for Web's favourite free database Sun Microsystems is to pay $1bn for open source database developer MySQL.â¦
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One analyst says a big chunk of the so-called "open source market" is already made up of leading traditional software vendors such as IBM and Oracle, who are following hybrid open source/propietary business models. And "pure play" vendors aren't necessarily that pure, either.
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Blog: Open source applications will drive a hefty load of infrastructure purchases in the future.  Proprietary vendors who hide their heads in the sand and try to avoid this trend or make it difficult for would-be open source partners to work with them will fin
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TechWeb - Sun's recent decision to open-source some elements of Java is pretty exciting -- but a few years overdue, says &lt;i&gt;InformationWeek&lt;/i&gt; columnist Eric A. Hall
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Hefty valuations = a bet on the future.  That future is clearly open source + SaaS, based on the multiples people are willing to pay.
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After months of anticipation, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) finally has a concrete roadmap to roll out the source code for Solaris 10 under the OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
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Pushes the blue elephant EnterpriseDB, the opens source database company, aims to capitalize on the uncertainty around MySQL's purchase by Sun Microsystems, and is wooing developers with improved capabilities and services.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundationâs Eclipse World 2006 made its way to Cambridge, Mass., in early September, with foundation executives touting the success of the open source application development project in attracting developer interest and support from big-name players such as IBM. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill caught up with The foundationâs Executive Director Mike Milinkovich to talk about the organizationâs accomplishments, competition with Microsoft and Sun, respecting Java and the road ahead. InfoWorld: How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software, or is the main attraction to Eclipse still that itâs all free? Mike Milinkovich: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. Iâm quite confident that itâs in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just donât have the hard numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free -- the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse, and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform. IW: I just met with a company thatâs basing its technology on Eclipse, and it has no salespeople. Do you see that as a trend where software companies, particularly open source software companies, donât have salespeople because they donât see the need? MM: Historically enterprise software has been sold through [a] direct salesforce channel. I do believe over time, weâre starting to see success in open source software products in areas which have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. Iâm thinking of things like Sugar CRM and CompiereÂ  [ERP] and open source products like this. Those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, I think that over time, yeah, there are going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen. IW: Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse? MM: Nope, absolutely not. Theyâve made it pretty clear that theyâre not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBean strategy. IW: What do you think of their being two kind of rival camps? Is it good for competition? MM: Well weâre certainly not shy of competition, and frankly weâre winning. IW: Sun seemsÂ  to say differently. MM: Oh, good for them. Iâve got the numbers, they donât. IW: Who do you see as your main rival, NetBeans or Windows .Net? MM: We clearly and have always felt that Eclipse is about enabling competition with Microsoft. IW: And how have you fared there? MM: Actually, we started five years ago, and I would say that starting from zero the growth of Eclipse over the past five years has been absolutely phenomenal. IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Some of the scripting languages as well as .Net? MM: I wouldnât say weâre de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and thereâs more projects joining the folds, thereâs more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. So weâre clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, thatâs never been the vision for Eclipse. Itâs always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for. IW: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon? MM: A couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform (RCP). More support for multiple languages. Within Eclipse, in the next quarter weâre planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. Because PHP is a really important language both for enterprise development, but Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that weâre pretty excited about.
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Sun said that it would buy MySQL, a Swedish company that is the world leader in open-source database software used by Internet powers like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed up Thursday evening at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and declared he would not answer questions about the GNU general public license version 3, but he did disclose his lifelong fantasy concerning open source licensing. The GPLv3, which is expected to be released at noon on Friday, has been the focus of a public exchange between Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds over the future of open source licensing and the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux. Schwartz, who briefly stopped to talk to reporters, said he wants licensing to be kept simple. "I want to get to uniform licenses for everything we do," Schwartz said. "So if you look at Sun you say 'Oh, I know you. I get you.'" Schwartz did not say which license he was considering. Sun has developed its own open source license, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Then he added, "One of my great fantasies in life is that the number of people with opinions on open source licenses will come roughly into balance with the number of people who have read them." "Go read the Mozilla license," he said. "It is very difficult for an international company to use it because it is for the [United States] only. What do I tell people in China? Sorry, if you have a gripe you need to come back to Santa Clara," he said with a laugh. Schwartz then took the stage and joked with the audience, thanking them for Sun's fourth-quarter revenue. He then talked about helping customers to condense their infrastructure by consolidating workloads, to run virtualized infrastructure at scale, and to develop compelling services. He singled out identity as one of those services. He then laid out Sun's position on open source software and licensing. "The core value of Sun comes down to a basic set of things," he said. "Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity." "We're every way thinking to combine the communities because we think that gives us the critical mass to go after the big opportunities in the marketplace." Shortly afterward Schwartz welcomed questions from the crowd, but added "just not about GPLv3, please." Earlier this month, Torvalds used the Linux Kernel Mailing List to slam Sun in responding to a post about Sun and open source licensing: "You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that Sun is in this to actually further some open source agenda." He then launched into a "cynical prediction" slamming Sun's licensing interests around the OpenSolaris kernel and GPLv3, and predicting Sun would use licensing to protect patents on its ZFS file system rather than make it freely and widely available to the open source community. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and kernel developers have said there is little chance the Linux community would move to the new GPLv3 because it is not significantly better than GPLv2 and could take six months or more to convert all the components of the kernel. "A GPLv3-only release [of the OpenSolaris kernel] would actually let [Sun] look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," Torvalds wrote. A day later, Schwartz responded on his blog in a friendly tone disputing Torvalds contention the Linux hurts Sun and saying Linux was not the enemy. Schwartz, writing on his blog, addresses Torvalds personally: "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense." Like the licensing, there also was no word Thursday night about dinner.
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Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
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Sun Microsystems' purchase earlier this month of open-source database maker MySQL may have been pennywise and pound-foolish, with many observers suggesting that Valley stalwart Sybase was in fact the smarter buy. The logic is compelling -- but won't someone stand up for the cussedly independent?
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Blog: MySQL is relentlessly pushing its way toward an IPO, as BusinessWeek reports, which makes the entire open source ecosystem that much more valuable.