GooTube of the Day

Fair enough, I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog and I’m copying him. It’s an Indian version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Enjoy.

Speaking of Zimbra

If you haven’t seen their email program, check it out. Here’s their website. The program is just amazing. And it’s open source. You can download it free and play with it. When I visited the company a while back they told me their sales guys are just sitting at their desks catching deals. Fortune 500 companies are trying the stuff out on their own and then dialing in to place orders. After seeing a demo of the software I could see why. I wanted to beg Forbes to rip out Exchange and replace it with Zimbra. This isn’t just some open-source clone or knock-off of an existing product. This is a huge leap beyond the proprietary state of the art. Once again, we’re seeing the real promise of open source. Better stuff, faster to market, easier to deal with the vendor, less hassles, lower prices. What’s not to love? And in Zimbra’s case, you’ve got no worries about getting a shakedown from the thought police at the Free Software Foundation over some alleged GPL violations.

Yet another GPL shunner

Seems like every new open-source company I meet is using some license other than the GPL. ActiveGrid, Zimbra, and so on. Guys I met yet yesterday say when they first created the company, two years ago, their original plans was that they would not touch any GPL code. Yes, they use words like “viral” and “infection.” As it happens they’ve ended up using one bit of GPL code but only after going to great lengths to keep it isolated from everything else they do. The rest of their stuff is shipped under the Mozilla license.

I bring this up beause you’re probably hearing a lot of FUD on certain blogs (*cough* Groklaw *cough*) about the “mighty GPL.” And you’re probably hearing how 60% of all open-source projects use GPL. But as the guy I met yesterday explained, 90% of the projects on SourceForge are dead. If you look at real open-source companies trying to build real businesses, hardly any are using GPL. That’s partly because they don’t want the hassle of dealing with the FSF and its zany ideology. And partly because some of their customers don’t want GPL code in their shops. At Zimbra, the email company, they shunned GPL because they want to allow their reseller partners to customize code and keep their modifications to themselves, so they can differentiate their offerings in the market. Zimbra wants to enable its partners to make money. That way they’ll keep selling Zimbra’s underlying email code. Wow. What an idea.

Reasons for the silence

Had a phone conversation with another open-source CEO who suggested an explanation for the relative lack of hate mail after my recent profile of Richard Stallman: “Nobody gives a damn about Stallman anymore. Linux has gone mainstream.” I have a sense this guy is right and that folks in the Linux ecosystem are fed up with Stallman and his antics. This doesn’t bode well for the GPLv3.

The times they are a-changin’

Had lunch today with the CEO of a venture-funded open-source startup who a) told me he uses a Windows PC as his primary machine; and b) was zipping around Boston in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car. Not your daddy’s open-source company, as they say. Oh well. Viva la revolucion!

Take the money and run

JBoss CEO Marc Fleury is headed for the hills, so I’m told. Fleury sold out to Red Hat last April and won’t be around to ring in the New Year, according to the word on the street. This despite all the hooey about how exciting it would be to work for Matthew and his user-friendly team at Red Hat. Fleury’s not the only JBoss vet making for the exits. Some of the key guys are already gone. To all you volunteer hackers who helped make Marc un homme tres riche, Marc would like to offer a sincere, Merci beaucoup. Oh, and remember, Marc loves you. Really, he does. Peace and love. And au revoir, suckers!

The end of the OS as we know it?

Another really smart post from rPath CEO Billy Marshall, this time re: the Oracle Linux move. His take is that neither Oracle nor Red Hat are providing the right solution. (But rPath is, by letting ISVs create software appliances.)Money quote:

“All of Red Hat’s partners stood up to endorse Oracle as a Red Hat competitor because they believe Red Hat should have done a better job serving them. It’s time for all of us to take responsibility for this problem and move to a better model. A model where everyone can have what they want, and the operating system providers can be successful without failing their customers or their partners.”

rPath is about the coolest company I’ve come across in the tech space lately. Really, really worth watching.

Welcome to the jungle, ladies

My favorite side angle to the Oracle news was all the whining from open source types about how big bad Oracle is taking the work of all these other people and profiting by it. Um, right. And Red Hat is doing what? Oh, that’s right. Kicking back a little code, and paying loads of lip service to the “community.” While its management gets rich on the backs of all those volunteer hackers. Obtain a clue, people. The model you’ve created pretty much begs to be exploited. And you were all in favor of this kind of vicious price slashing when Microsoft and Oracle were on the receiving end. (“Hey, this is capitalism, we’re offering a better product at a lower price, and a better business model, therefore we win.”) Now one of your own is getting hammered (if indeed Red Hat really is “one of your own”) and you’re all in a tizzy. Same thing happens every time Sun or Microsoft or Oracle take any kind of shot at open source in public. The same foaming-at-the-mouth jihadists who love to rant and rave about dealing death and destruction to old-guard companies are the first to cry foul (or “FUD”) and start whimpering like puppies when someone gives them a snap on the nose. Wake up, crunchies. You want to talk smack and compete with these big bad tech companies? Well, guess what. They play dirty. They always have. Welcome to the jungle, ladies. I had breakfast with a Sun Microsystems guy last week who says the crunchies seem to expect the “bad guys” to just sit around and let themselves be attacked while doing nothing in response; and if they do fight back (eg, Sun releases Open Solaris and tries to convince customers it’s better than Linux) there’s outrage from the “community.” He points out that Sun, IBM and HP have been attacking each other by any means necessary for years. Now the crunchies have wandered into the ring and expect the rules to be changed, exceptions made for them, because they’re a) tiny underdogs; and/or b) good instead of evil. Um, not gonna happen.

What Oracle really wants

My first take on the Oracle Linux announcement ran on Forbes.com last week. It was a quickie, five or six paragraphs banged out from a hotel room after a late-night dinner in San Francisco and combined with other material ginned up by editors in New York. Some other angles worth considering:

1. Who in their right mind wants to become an Oracle customer? Every Oracle customer I’ve ever talked to had smoke coming out of his ears about Oracle’s pricing and licensing practices. Most of these CIOs are combing through their data centers looking for every possible app that can be moved off Oracle onto MySQL or some other cheap alternative. One thing they really hate: Oracle makes customers continue paying maintenance fees for older versions of its database even though those programs were EOL’d years ago and Oracle no longer offers any actual maintenance and support for them. In other words, you pay for service that doesn’t even exist. Why? Because if you don’t, Oracle takes away your discounts on the newer versions, Oracle 9 and 10. This kind of arm-twisting would make Tony Soprano blush.

Now, Red Hat may not be perfect, and in fact their customers do their share of grumbling about licensing practices, but they are at least seen as being on the side of the angels, offering customers a better deal than old-guard shops like Oracle and Microsoft.

2. Nevertheless, if I were a Red Hat customer I’d be using the Oracle offer to gain some pricing leverage — the way Microsoft customers have been using the threat of switching to Linux even when they have no real intention of switching. Let’s face it. Most of these guys who have switched to Red Hat are cheapskates. Forget all the hooey about freedom, etc. These guys moved to save money. You think they’re not going to take every opportunity to twist Red Hat’s arm and squeeze a few points off their contracts?

3. I’m not sure Oracle actually wants to win any real Linux support contracts. It may be enough just to force Red Hat to slash its prices. (And yeah, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik says he won’t cut prices. I don’t believe him.) Larry pioneered this strategy, called “choking off the air supply,” with Oracle’s rivals in the database business years ago. His move could whack 50% off Red Hat’s revenue stream. Last year Red Hat did $280 million in revenue and made a profit. Cut that revenue figure in half, however, and they’re in the red. SG&A was $130 million, R&D was $40 million. Even if Oracle slices off only 25%, Red Hat’s got problems.

4. The move exposes the fundamental weakness of commercial open source companies like Red Hat. They’re burdened with the R&D costs of a software developer, but have only the revenue stream of a services organization. (ie, no license fees.) It’s a thin business at best and nobody except Red Hat has ever managed to make a go of it. Big companies like IBM can use open source as a loss leader to pull sales of other products. Companies that have nothing but open source must struggle to get by.

5. The Oracle move robs Red Hat of its most valuable asset — its wildly overpriced shares.

6. The Friday before Oracle announced this move, Red Hat gave Szulik a 50% pay raise. Ahem. This does however continue Red Hat’s fine tradition of enriching management. This place churned out a bunch of paper millionaires long before it ever made a dime of profit.

7. The saddest aspect of the affair was when Novell, desperate for attention, tried to get in on the action by putting out a statement saying it welcomed Oracle to the Linux market. Translation: “Hey, don’t forget about us! We’re screwed too!” Novell lags so badly that Oracle didn’t even bother mentioning them.

8. How long until Oracle does something like this to MySQL? If MySQL ever manages to turn a profit or sell stock to the public, Larry will be waiting around the corner with a baseball bat.

“Oracle just validated our market”

It’s my favorite line of corporate PR hooey, the one companies always trot out when some giant company (usually Microsoft) enters their turf. “Oh, we’re so glad they’re going to compete with us; it will raise awareness of the market; it’ll bring attention to us; people will look at the big guy and then see that we’re better; so yeah, we’re glad that the big guy is now competing with us; we think it’s great.”

Red Hat and Novell are both trotting this one out re: the Oracle announcement of support for Linux. “We agree with Oracle that Linux is an enterprise-class operating system and we’re glad they are validating Linux for enterprise customers.”

Just ask yourself: What happens every time a company says this? Right. They’re road kill. If I did PR the one thing I would tell a company is never, ever say this. It’s like giving yourself the kiss of death.