Truth Happens

That’s the Red Hat marketing slogan. I’m wondering how it applies to the issue of whether JBoss has ever made a profit and how much software JBoss is actually selling. For years Marc Fleury went around claiming his company was profitable. See here for example. Earlier this year when Red Hat bought JBoss, Red Hat’s CFO told analysts the company “has had negative cash flow” but was on track to turn a profit by September. He also said JBoss was on track to do more than $60 million in 2006 and more than $100 million in 2007. Now Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik tells CNET that JBoss “is still unprofitable, but it’s improving.” And they expect JBoss to do $22 million to $27 million from the start of June, when the deal closed, until fiscal year end on Feb. 28. Split the difference and call it $25 million. That’s over nine months. That looks more like $30 million for the year — a bit shy of the “more than $60 million” projection. Wonder if the “more than $100 million” projection still holds for 2007. Especially now that Marc Fleury has gone on his “paternity leave.” And most of his top reports are long gone too. Ahem.

About that Iowa antitrust case

The non-IBM-connected Groklaw blog, which so far has written not a word about IBM’s lawsuits against Amazon and PSI, is, however, scrutinizing the rather obscure Comes v. Microsoft antitrust case in Iowa and treating it as if it were an incredibly important piece of litigation, publishing lengthy articles and loads of details and transcripts. (This bit of black ops PR work is of course something that Groklaw’s non-sponsors at IBM would no doubt appreciate, if they were by some chance helping to fund Groklaw, which of course they absolutely are not.)

According to Groklaw, plaintiffs in this case are represented by brilliant, heroic lawyers who are striking a blow for freedom, plus truth, justice and the American way, and who must struggle mightily to fend off the dirty tricks and sleazy tactics employed by the beast from Redmond. So I’m betting you won’t hear anything on Groklaw about this bit of wackiness in which the plaintiffs didn’t turn over documents to Microsoft because they’d only been ordered to show docs that their expert witnesses had “reviewed” while preparing their testimony, and the plaintiff lawyers construed this word to be “re-viewed” and to mean documents that had been looked at twice. Incredible. The “expert witnesses” involved here are a husband-and-wife team who run a “litigation support” business called Applied Economic Consulting. In other words, guns for hire. Judge, after grilling a plaintiff lawyer, told plaintiffs to quit the shenanigans and turn over the documents to Microsoft.

Check out too the personal injury lawyer, Roxanne Conlin, who’s running this case. Note please the giant cat across the top of her law firm’s Web site. It’s no accident. In addition to being a lawyer, she’s also a cat lady. You know, the kind of person who has somewhere between nine and twenty cats living in her house at any given time. I’m not making this up. She also once ran for governor. Now this cat lady lawyer is very upset about the price of Microsoft Office, or something, and gosh darn it she is gonna make those big bad guys at Microsoft pay! Her opening statement lasted not seven minutes, or seven hours, but seven days. This is apparently a new state record in Iowa. Conlin’s opening included an overview of the last 20 years of computer industry history. Groan.

Ask yourself this. Microsoft has settled cases in state after state after state. Clearly they’ve offered this woman money to go away. And yet they’re now in court, with a case that is expected to last six months. Damages sought are something like $300 million. Do you really think Microsoft is refusing to part with the cash?

I’m sorry but I can’t work up any outrage over having to pay $100 for the student edition of Office. And though I’m not a fan of Windows, I’ve managed to discover an alternative. It’s called an Apple Mac and you can buy them online or in stores. To be sure, the Mac costs more than a comparable Windows machine. (Despite all of Microsoft’s “price gouging.”) But if you really hate Windows and are too cheap to spring for a Mac, you can get Linux and Open Office for nothing. I’ve got a Linux machine running at my office and it works fine. So what is the problem? And why, when it comes to Microsoft, do people become so unhinged?

Guess who else says Linux infringes on patents?

Richard M. Stallman, in a speech in Tokyo, admits what Groklaw kooks keep denying. You can read the transcript here. Money quote:

“Two years ago, a thorough study found that the kernel Linux infringed 283 different software patents, and that’s just in the US. Of course, by now the number is probably different and might be higher.”

The “thorough study” he refers to is the one done by OSRM, which claimed 27 of the infringed patents were held by Microsoft. Note that Stallman lays the infringement on “the kernel Linux,” ie, “the stuff that Torvalds does, not my stuff.” And of course the context is that RMS is saying why patents are bad. Still, like it or not, patents are here. RMS and the others can’t keep ducking them, or trying to make them go away by protesting. And please, no more emails telling me to identify the 28 patents that Microsoft alleges are infringed. Enough already. I know, you’re using Linux, and you like it, and you don’t want someone to take away your toys. Deal with it.

A former Red Hat exec writes in

I won’t use his name but he wrote me an email after reading my article about Red Hat in the current edition of Forbes. He says:

A very interesting and thought provoking article, I tend to agree that there are many questions which can be asked about Red Hat and particularly the stewardship of Mr Szulik. … I have always felt that the appalling track record of the company in hiring and losing senior executives has never been fully explored, and the track record of disastrous acquisitions and subsequent collapse of value with key staff leaving almost immediately is worth more investigation. There must be at least 10 companies acquired since 1999 starting with Cygnus and finishing with JBoss look at what has been paid for them, and the return to shareholders. Unfortunately I suspect the emperors new clothes syndrome is catching up with them.

Take this with a grain of salt, but …

Microsoft and Novell say they commissioned a research survey to find out what customers thought of the Microsoft-Novell deal. Of 201 IT execs interviewed, 95% approved of the Microsoft-Novell collaboration, 87% said they’re more like to consider buying Suse Linux, and 97% said they want platform providers to improve interoperability of their systems. (Hard to imagine who were the 3% who voted “no” on that last one.) And 89% said they want tech companies to take care of IP issues for them. No real surprises here, but I think it points out again the disparity between customers who use open source products and the Stallmanites. Two different worlds, two different sets of interests.

“Open source is not a business model”

So says Billy Marshall of rPath in yet another smart blog post. Money quote:

Open source is not a business model, it is a development model. The software business, open source or not, is about providing customers with a product that is better than the competing product. This concept is fundamental to business, and yet somehow a bunch of young software companies have it in their head that there is something new and magical about open source the exempts it from this fundamental truth.

There is good stuff about Billy’s time at Red Hat and how that company thought about selling software to customers. (It wasn’t about religion, it was about better performance for less dollars.) Billy really is one of the smartest and most thoughtful guys in this space. Studied aerospace engineering undergrad at Georgia Tech then did an MS in management and engineering from MIT. And he ran sales at Red Hat during its boom years. Needless to say, his blog is a must read if you’re following the open source arena. And rPath is definitely a company to keep watching.

I guess I’m cynical

Simon Phipps of Sun seems to think so. He’s penned a response to my recent blog item about Sun’s newfound love of the GPL, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. I suggested that maybe Sun wasn’t entirely sincere in its affections, and that maybe Sun was just trying to get some good publicity and a leg up on Linux. Simon, forgive me for being jaded. It’s just that I’ve been covering Sun for a while now. And I’ve seen and heard so many things from Sun. Like the time I reported that they were shipping million-dollar machines that contained a fatal cache memory flaw, forcing customers to sign NDAs in order to get repairs, and lying about it. Wow, did I get yelled at by a bunch of top Sun execs, who told me how “unethical” and “dishonest” and “irresponsible” I was for reporting this. Yet not long ago I had lunch with a former top Sun engineering exec who told me that if anything the cache memory situation had been even worse than what I’d reported. There’s also the time, back in 2000, that Scott McNealy and Ed Zander told me that an economic downturn could be good for Sun because it would drive customers from other vendors to Sun’s better-bang-for-the-buck SPARC servers. And a huge boom was right around the corner, they said. Ahem. Or the time, in 2004, when a Sun exec swore that Linux wasn’t hurting Sun’s business and that nobody moved from Unix to Linux. There was the time when McNealy vowed Sun wouldn’t open source Java, and told IBM to mind its own business or open source DB2. Or the time when McNealy said, “Open source is free like a puppy is free.” We had the period when Sun was bashing Linux as inferior to Solaris. This was followed, naturally, by the era when Sun started praising Linux and McNealy put on a penguin suit. Now it seems Sun is back promoting Solaris and trying to make a move on Linux, and currying favor with the FSF at a time when FSF is at odds with Linus Torvalds and the kernel guys.

Yes, I guess I’m cynical, but I can’t help noting that Sun’s sudden cuddling up to the Free Software Foundation is happening now, when Sun has been losing money for years, and when Solaris has become less and less relevant, and not six years ago, when things were going well. Not to be too cynical, but it looks kind of like a Hail Mary pass. And while I suppose it must feel really good to have PJ on Groklaw say nice things about you, in private I’ve been told by longtime Sun folks that they think PJ is a kook, and ditto for RMS and the rest of his merry band of anarchists. So forgive me for suspecting that when you post such nice things about RMS and the GPLv3 process on your blog, it’s kind of a publicity stunt.

For shareholders I suppose the main question is this: How will open-sourcing Java and Solaris benefit Sun financially? Will any of this enable Sun to sell more hardware? If so, brilliant. If not, who cares?

My latest on Red Hat

I think you can open this without the hassle of getting a Forbes.com membership.

Who benefits from the confusion?

Occurs to me that one of the biggest beneficiaries of Stallman’s Linux mess (soon to be the Linux-Solaris-Java mess) could be rPath. Because perhaps the best way for customers to insulate themselves from all of this haggling over license terms is simply to use an “ad hoc” operating system that comes attached directly to the application. As the OS wars continue, and actually get worse, rPath’s proposal — forget trying to manage operating systems in your data center, and let us and your ISVs do the grunt work and sell you “appliances” that plug into VMware software — looks more and more appealing. VMware, of course, is the other big beneficiary of all this mess.

Could the future of Linux be as an “ad hoc” system, customized and optimized for narrow tasks? Billy Marshall of rPath believes so. And I think he’s right.

Sun takes a page from the IBM playbook

Say nice things about the extremists, adopt the GPLv2 for Java and promise to embrace the GPLv3 in the future, and maybe you’ll get a halo effect. Way to go, Simon Phipps. Sun appears to be plotting an end run around Linux, becoming “more open” than Linux (by adopting GPLv3) and therefore convincing ISVs and customers to dump Linux and swing back to Open Solaris instead. Sun reckons it can take advantage of the confusion and bad blood in the Linux community, where a painful schism is looming now that Linus Torvalds and his kernel developers are at odds with Stallman and the FSF. Unless one side blinks, that schism is going to be painful for customers and Linux distributors alike.

Well, you can’t blame Sun for trying to exploit the trouble to its advantage. But their move ultimately will create only more confusion, further fragmenting the market. The big strength of Linux has been that there was one Linux, versus a half dozen Unixes. Solaris under GPLv3 will be fine if you don’t care about DRM or patent rights. If you do care about those things, you’ll use the Linux kernel under GPLv2 and some forked versions of the Stallman-controlled pieces. Or you can use AIX or some “commercial” version of Solaris that Sun will no doubt keep in play. Or, um, you can just throw in the towel and use Windows, which despite its drawbacks, at least doesn’t keep flip-flopping around in an effort to avoid or embrace the Stallmanites.

I wonder if customers will at some point get fed up with the hassle of having to keep track of which vendors are using what license for which programs and what terms the new version has. I wonder too if customers will ever cop on to the fact that despite all the rhetoric about “freedom” none of these moves is being made on their behalf. All of these maneuvers are being made for the same old reasons — so that Sun can get an edge on IBM, or IBM can hurt Sun, or HP can hurt one or both of them, or so that Stallman can harm Microsoft, and so on. None of this — none of it — has anything to do with helping customers. It’s just the same old baloney from the same old cast of Unix vendors. Only now they’ve thrown Richard Stallman into the mix to make things just a wee bit more volatile and unpredictable.

And where’s Microsoft? Plugging along, taking constant crap from all of them, but growing. Still growing. And realizing that customers — most of them anyway — are not religious. And they hate getting caught up in other people’s religious wars.