Archive for May, 2008

MySQL licensing redux

Published by
jeremy
at May 8, 2008 in MySQL and Sun. 0 Comments

A follow up to one of the more divisive announcements made at the MySQL Conference. From the 451 Group Blog:

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products,” writes Kaj.

“My hope is that the experiment when it comes to closed source extensions developed by Sun is now ended. As far as I know, there is no existing plans for any closed source extensions to the MySQL server,” adds Monty.

While that seems pretty clear cut, there is still room for a little confusion. Kaj writes: “To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it.”

Monty clarifies: “I interpret this, in the context of Mårten’s and Jonathan’s announcements, that we will continue to support and make available commercial addons to the MySQL server from third party, like the Infobright storage engine. Things that we develop ourselves at Sun, at least on the server, will continue to be open source.”

It was always made clear that the decision to ship closed extensions was made before the Sun acquisition. It’s good to see that Sun stepped up, listened to feedback and changed this. It may have made sense for a company looking to IPO, but it doesn’t make sense for Sun. While it’s now clear that Sun-shipped server code will now be open, they also made it clear that 3rd party commercial extensions will continue to be embraced. I see that as a good thing. The “at least on the server” qualifier does leave the door open for something on the MySQL periphery to be closed, but that’s been the case for a few years now (MySQL Monitor for instance). If you’d like to know more about the announcement, Monty has posted his opinion:

I was yesterday attending the “Open Tuesday” Sun & MySQL event. One of the first questions I got from the audience during my questions & answer session was what is my take of the recent MySQL proposition of having closed source parts/modules in the server.

I was very happy to be able to say that Mårten some hours earlier had announced on CommuntyOne that the MySQL server is and is always going to be open source.

It’s very good to see that Mårten is continuing to be responsive to the MySQL community and to the MySQL customers. Thanks to Mårten for doing the right thing! Thanks to the MySQL community for expressing their opinions!

Monty also posted a very good (and honest) assesment of the MySQL Conference here.

–jeremy

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Microsoft Walks Away from the Yahoo Deal

Published by
jeremy
at May 5, 2008 in Microsoft. 2 Comments

Unless you were in a cave over the weekend, I’m sure you’ve seen that Microsoft has walked away from its 40B+ Yahoo acquisition attempt. I’ve largely avoided the topic, but do have some commentary now. Note that many people think this is just a posturing attempt by Microsoft and that’s entirely possible. First let me say that I think the merger would have been spectacularly bad for Microsoft. The cultural and integration issues alone would have been nearly unsurmountable. Would the mail portion of the deal even have gotten regulatory approval? How many high profile departure would you have seen? How many projects that really give Yahoo much of its street credibility would have been crushed? I’m not sure that Flickr, delicious, Zimbra and many others would have gone to Microsoft given the choice. That being said I think the deal would have been bad for Yahoo as well. Microsoft has had a terrible track record on the web and has multiple cash cows to protect. In the end the only way I saw the deal being feasible would be if Microsoft spun things out into a fully autonomous company. I didn’t see any indication that was going to happen.

On to Ballmer, I really think this underscores the fact that he needs to go if Microsoft is going to turn itself around. He seemed to have no coherent plan here. It almost seems if he woke up one day really wanted Yahoo and just didn’t think it through. Microsoft wants to compete with Google so bad they seem to be getting irrational. It’s clear they can’t do this organically, but I really don’t think Yahoo was the answer.

Next come the shareholders. There’s already a ton of speculation that this will result in shareholders lawsuits. To me that makes no sense for a couple reasons. First, as a shareholder it will distract the company and further drive down the price of the stock. The more tragic part though is the current state of the street. Everyone is so concerned with the next days closing price that very few people take the long view anymore. Unless you’re day trading, if you invest in a company you should be looking at the long term. That means trusting management. IMHO shareholder lawsuits should be reserved for gross negligence and other egregious acts. We remain far too litigious and it’s going to come back to haunt us. FWIW, the stock currently sits in the mid-24 range, which makes it down about 12%. That’s not nearly as bad as some people were speculating. MSFT is up mildly.

On to morale. Most people within Microsoft seem to be happy about the deal falling through. Many jobs have been saved and they get to keep their $43B cash horde. This happiness may wear off as soon as they realize they still are not effectively competing in the space, but with that much cash they should be able to figure something out. Things aren’t as clear at Yahoo. Yang and co are clearly happy, but the rest of the staff seems to have people on all sides of the equation. It will take Yahoo having a couple very good quarters or making a really compelling announcement for that to change if I had to guess. It’s been a long few months if you work at YHOO.

So were do things go from here? There has been talk of Yahoo grabbing AOL. I can’t see that making any sense, but let’s hope Yahoo doesn’t do it just to look like they’re making moves. MySpace seems a little more reasonable. I also see reports that Yahoo should buy back a bunch of stock. At first glance that makes a ton of sense, since the board clearly thinks the stock is way undervalued at the moment. With only $2.5B or so in cash though, they won’t be able to make a big enough dent to really make it worth while. The money could almost certainly be spent better elsewhere.

Some additional thoughts:
* This deal would have been really bad for Open Source. Zimbra is the first thing that comes to mind, but Yahoo does more in the Open Source space than they get credit for.
* It looks like Bill Miller and a couple other huge holders would have gotten behind a deal in the $35 range. If Microsoft really wanted the company, they almost surely could have had it.
* It will be interesting to see if Yahoo moves forward with the Google outsourcing, or if that will prove to simply have been posturing.
* Yahoo must have made it really clear that if Microsoft went hostile, that they would poison pill themselves to death. We don’t get too many of these in our industry and Yahoo is actually setup poorly to defend against a proxy fight, since everyone comes up for election at once.

Additional reading:
Kara
NYT
“The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this as it unfolds.

–jeremy

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The OpenSolaris Community v2: Prepare Yourself

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux, Open Source and Sun. 0 Comments

Sun is a company I plan on covering a bit more as they continue to delve deeper into Open Source. I’ve commented on the current messaging issue Sun has around its Open Source participation previously. I haven’t been following Open Solaris as much as I’d have liked, but this post by Ben gets you up to speed on the current situation:

Ian Murdock’s distro formly known as “Indiana” will be birthed as “OpenSolaris” in less than a week, being debuted at CommunityOne on May 5th. This will be a major landmark even in the history of Solaris, right up there with the BSD-to-SysV transition and release of the code. There is no talk at Sun regarding Solaris 11, when pushed the only quote I get is “over my dead body”, apparently coming from high within the organization. While no one will clarify on the situation, the current vibe seems to be that Solaris 10 will be with us for a very long time, in update purgatory, while the future revolves around the OpenSolaris distribution. Ultimately the decision will probly be made by Sun’s attempts to get ISV’s behind OpenSolaris… but this is only my hunch, I’ll continue pushing Sun to clarify the roadmap, perhaps at CommunityOne will learn more.

… Its time for a community reset. With the release of the OpenSolaris distro the last bits of the community started by Andy Tucker and Claire Giordano will be, in my view, gone away. The experiment in community official ended and replaced. Rather than the community being joint owners of Solaris it will be affirmed that Sun is firmly staying at the helm and we’re free to board the train and pitch in if we choose. Those of us fighting against the tide are now presented with a choice… give up and try to re-invent our roles in the “new reality” or continue to fight the inevitable like so many of those in our community who still whine if an OS doesn’t run on an i386 with 512K of RAM looking like a senile prick.

It seems clear to me that Sun is not going to give up full control of Open Solaris. To be fair, Red Hat didn’t go as open with Fedora as was initially assumed either. In the end, much of it comes down to how Sun perceives Solaris driving its bottom line. It used to be that Solaris sold expensive SPARC hardware. That’s not as much the case any more. Where that leaves Solaris is unclear to me. Sun is still driving innovation - you need look no further than DTrace and ZFS to see evidence of that. Does that sell enough Sun hardware to justify the engineering costs associated with Solaris? I don’t know, but at some point Sun is going to have to look very at that question and they may not like the answer they get.

While catching up on Open Solaris, I also came across two good posts by Ted. In What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris he looks into what kinds of participation Sun was originally looking for when they launched Open Solaris. His Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source follow up delves into a Brian Aker comment about projects moving between “organic” and “non-organic” (or in the case of Solaris->Open Solaris, moving between proprietary and either organic/non-organic Open Source). These kind of issues are going to be getting more and more scrutiny if I had to guess, as more and more commercial Open Source companies are going to have to figure out their business models and hit revenue goals. The commercial Open Source space is starting to mature, and I don’t think some people are going to like it.

–jeremy

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OLPC’s New President & Negroponte: Its a Laptop Project Now

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

It’s a bit sad to see the new direction the OLPC project may be taking. The Open Source community has put a lot into the project, not only from a technical standpoint but from a marketing one as well. I think many of us thought that Open Source was baked in and part of what was needed for the project to obtain its goals. It’s becoming clear that’s not the case and the project has already seen some high profile departures. For my part, LQ was one of the first “give one get one” customers and we promoted it fairly heavily at conferences and online. I really agreed with the original goals of the project. It seems things are starting to unravel a bit and it will be a shame if things don’t work out as originally planned.

–jeremy

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Gratis Ubuntu Live 2008 Conference Pass

Published by
jeremy
at May 1, 2008 in Ubuntu and UbuntuLive. 0 Comments

Are you interested in attending the second Ubuntu Live conference? It’s my pleasure to inform you that LQ is able to give away one $895 full conference pass absolutely free of charge. I attended the event last year and it was a very good one. With all that’s happened in the Ubuntu community since, I’m looking forward to attending again this year. If you’re interested in the gratis pass, head over to this thread for more information. Good luck.

–jeremy

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