Is Red Hat doing its part to win the 'open source' war?
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Confusion at Club Badgeware Analysis Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing but open source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.â¦
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Open source doesn't necessarily automatically translate into better paid support for customers.  But it does offer a lot more options and aligns customers with vendors more tightly.
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Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle.
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Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
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Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.At its JBoss World conference in Orlando, Florida, Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s Middleware Business, said the company hopes JBoss will be a major part of 50 percent of all enterprise software infrastructure deployments by 2015. &quot;We believe it is an achievable, realistic goal,&quot; he said.To reach that goal, Red Hat introduced a multifaceted plan that includes opening technology &quot;acceleration&quot; centers, adding sales and marketing support, and putting together an enterprise-class middleware stack. The stack would be made up of JBoss and other open-source software for management, application integration, and application development.Red Hat purchased JBoss in April 2006 and has been trying to integrate the Java-based application infrastructure, or middleware, with its Linux business to become a multiproduct company.In an interview last week, Red Hat&#39;s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said the hardest part of this has been changing JBoss&#39; business model to Red Hat&#39;s. JBoss gave its software away for free and charged for consulting and services. Red Hat has a &quot;.org&quot; community version of its product for anyone to use, as well as a more robust enterprise version for large-scale deployments. He said at the time that Red Hat now will use a similar model for making JBoss more successful in the enterprise.Muzilla echoed Whitehurst&#39;s notion that Red Hat will use the same strategy to boost JBoss in enterprises as it did to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux so successful. However, he said there is still &quot;a lack of understanding that you can really run your enterprise on open-source middleware.&quot;To change that perception, Red Hat plans to offer an &quot;enterprise-hardened, rock-solid&quot; stack of JBoss middleware that includes both existing products, such as JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss Transactions, JBoss Clustering, and JBoss Messaging, and other open-source products, Muzilla said Wednesday. Red Hat will test and certify the middleware stack to ensure the pieces work together and can sustain large-scale enterprise deployments, he said.Sales and customer support also are key to making a successful enterprise play, Muzilla said. In the past six months, Red Hat has added JBoss sales and presales specialists in North America to help sell the middleware to enterprises. The company also is hiring new marketing executives and is planning its first acceleration center. He said the centers will be in places &quot;where there is a lot of customer activity,&quot; without giving more details.Once the new technology labs for JBoss are open, customers will be able to use them to test Red Hat&#39;s JBoss stack, and it&#39;s likely Red Hat will build centers for a specific task, Muzilla said. &quot;Performance will be one lab, interoperability will be another,&quot; he said.
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A new open-source virtual-machine project has quickly won Linux allies, but its arrival brings complications.
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Investor's Business Daily - The hippy ethic championed in early ads for the Linux operating system is giving way to good old competitive rancor as Red Hat   and Novell   launch warring campaigns.
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By its very nature, open-source software would appear to run counter to the goals of venture capitalists. Not only is it distributed and developed for free by a loose-knit group of techies from around the
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Bad Java aftertaste Red Hat is suffering from JBoss reflux, according to a pair of prominent open source software watchers.â¦
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InfoWorld - The Story: What???s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ???liberal.??? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ???commercial.???
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What happens to open source in a cloud-based computing world?  Or when the enterprise runs dry?
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat Inc.'s woes this week raise the issue of whether IT investors are turning sour on open source. A somewhat disappointing forecast for the next quarter has investors fleeing, just as they have from the company's open-source rival, Novell Inc. A close analysis of the situation, however, may give savvy investors -- and open-source advocates -- courage. Red Hat's problems are probably more short-lived than Novell's. Red Hat investors are rattled: Company shares (RHAT) have lost almost US$5 in value over the last week, closing Thursday at $20.59, down $0.38 for the day. On Tuesday, Red Hat reported solid second-quarter earnings per share of $0.11, on revenue of $99.7 million. This beat expectations of analysts polled by Thomson First Call, of EPS of $0.10 on sales of $97.5 million. The problem was the company's forecast for next quarter: revenue of $103.5 million to $105.0 million, compared with the consensus estimate of $106 million. Even before these numbers came out, analysts were questioning the company's ability to execute a smooth merger with Jboss. Up until recently, investors bought into Red Hat's strategy to move up the software stack. The Jboss acquisition gives it an application server. But disappointing cash flow suggest problems with executing this strategy, and even perhaps some push-back from customers. Four different brokerages in the past month have downgraded their advice on Red Hat stock, with Soleil Securities Group Inc. recommending a "sell." But not all analysts are dour. Banc of America and UBS analysts, for example, have issued reports saying that Red Hat's problems are probably temporary, and that the company's strategy could still pay off with increased sales in the next few quarters. Novell could face more long-term problems. The company has had trouble articulating a coherent strategy. And even though Novell sold its stake in Celerant Consulting to focus on core open-source software, stand-alone Linux sales for the company hover around just $10 million. But it's hard to analyze Novell's business using up-to-date figures, since the company postponed its quarterly report earlier this month, as it completes a voluntary internal review around the granting of stock options to employees. Novell may have to restate earnings. The delay in its earnings report caused the Nasdaq to issue a delisting notice. So far, Novell has been able to stay listed, by protesting the notice and requesting a review process. The next few months should clarify issues around the two companies. Novell needs to get its internal review done, come out with earnings statements that analysts can rely on, and of course eventually show growth in new-software licenses. Red Hat has fewer hurdles to jump. An uptick in cash flow should offer assurances that its strategy to offer a broader portfolio of tools and server software is on track. REFERENCES: Novell faces delisting from Nasdaq, Sep. 21, 2006ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The biggest challenge for the open source community is that there are too few open source developers, according to Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc.
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Microsoft is not the realÂ patent threatÂ Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.
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Red Hat has announced plans to acquire network security software from Netscape&#39;s Enterprise Suite, adding it to its Open Source Architecture, The company says they will distribute it as open-source software, according to statements from company executives
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers