Monthly Archives: November 2006

Services and Expanding Borders, Sun, MS, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, and the Others

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A few short comments as I wake up to the morning’s catch. It sounds like Sun is about to make a move, which may effect the field in which the Novell/Microsoft situation took root. But first, a Forbes article frames the Microsoft/Novell agreement as a Novellian surrender. Is it? I think the telling part of why they’d frame it that way is the following point:

“Novell tried to put a brave face on things, even claiming that its chief executive, Ron Hovsepian, had initiated the talks with Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft’s lawyers have been quietly pressuring open-source companies like Novell for more than a year and warning their customers that they could be vulnerable to patent infringement claims because they’re using Linux.”

I like that quote because it feeds the suspicion I raised in my previous post on the topic, in which I said that I felt their constant affirming not to sue each other over patents, yet to pay weird licensing fees was some sort of red herring for something not being said publicly.

The Forbes article also notes

“But Novell also is admitting it cannot compete on its own against Red Hat. After two years of struggling, Novell holds only 20% market share of commercial Linux shipments; Red Hat commands virtually all of the rest.”

So this is curious motivation. Consider the 451 Group’s idea that Red Hat is becoming “The Poland of Software Vendors.” Is Red Hat sitting between Microsoft and Oracle initiatives, which may drive it into the ground (not that I’d characterize Poland that way–all analogies are only designed to go so far)? If Forbes’s stats indicate some of the motivation behind Novell’s deal with Microsoft, it will be interesting to see how many inroads it really will get from the Microsoft side.

The 451 article quotes Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical saying their strategy is unchanged. Canonical seems to have local partners spread-out in different geographies, which makes their service model feel like it may drive down a subtly different road than Red Hat’s or Novell’s. There is also the the issue of the other companies competing in the enterprise service/support game. Mandriva is an example. Mandriva has a bevy of service offerings for enterprise customers, including migration, business performance analysis, and certain enterprise app consulting services with its partners (Compiere would be the example here). I’m not sure what this all should entail in terms of Novell and Red Hat and their gargantuan neighbours, except maybe it’s too soon to see anyone off via a nebulous nepenthe.

Back to Sun. CRN is reporting that Sun is likely to choose the GPL to open source Java. Although I wouldn’t think this is necessarily related to the Novell/Microsoft news, there is a lateral connection. If, as some people have theorized, the Microsoft/Novell deal will help increase .NET adoption via embracing Mono improvements and popularization, then Sun has more to worry about in terms of its Java agenda. Many have argued for a long time that Java’s lack of real FOSS status has prevented it from exploding in greater popularity. I suspect that may be at least partially true, so let’s see what comes to bear as it gets GPLed.

Slow Erosion toward Open

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In the slew of posts today on the Microsoft/Novell agreement, I think one of the most interesting comes from David Berlind. David draws out locomotion methods of large companies like Google or Microsoft. In particular the issue of disruptive technologies. The established companies have to, one way or another, embrace these disruptions quickly, and there are a number of ways to do that. He notes how Google acquired Jotspot in that regard. Microsoft is faced with a lot disruptive technology issues, the biggest being the sea-change of Free and open source software. So the hidden twist in the strategy may be based in further .NET via Novell’s Mono project.

What I think makes Berlind’s point so interesting is the following observation

“Looking around at the many startups that springing up all over the world, that trend to either build-on or be an open source company isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up which means that, going forward, the only choice for closed-sourced companies to respond to disruption (or create it) may be to acquire open source companies.”

And if that’s the case, the result is that over time these proprietary companies will become open source companies. It feels a little like that stat about human cells regenerating entirely every seven years–you’re a whole new person. Will this continue as the case for the software industry?

Oh NOvell

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Novell and Microsoft, what are you doing? The news is out, Novell and Microsoft are partnering for the sake of office document interoperability, virtualization, and service oriented arch smoothness. After reading the press, I’m left with a few irksome thoughts on what this amounts to. In spite of the potential upside to what this agreement may result in, as well as the fact that it appears Microsoft is publicly recognizing a requirement to somehow support Linux based on real customer demand, it also sounds like a dodge of something that isn’t being explicitely said.

1) Virtualization. According to Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Novell, “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux.” But this is not accurate. Customers are already able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux via applications like VMWare, Parallels, and others. So the virtualization hype produced in this announcement sounds a little much, at least on the surface. Perhaps the two companies will produce something exciting and effective but the customers’ ability to do what they’re saying is not coming as a result of the Novell/Microsoft collaboration since that ability already exists.

2) Web services. “Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory® with Novell eDirectory.” Ok, that sounds good. Though what does it portend for the future? Mitch Ratcliffe comments from ZDNet:

“I’m not saying Microsoft is evil, only that it makes these interoperability deals to defeat its partner, not help them. In the 90s, when both Windows and Novell Netware were under assault by IP networks, they tried to co-exist. Microsoft started making Netware-compatible versions of its local area network management and operating system software.”

One wonders if this is a matter of history repeating itself.

3) Document format compatibility. This seems to focus on improving the compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (as Novell distributes it anyway). Err the document formats these applications use. Considering OpenOffice defaults to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft has been under increasing pressure to adhere to that standard or at least support it in addition to its own formats, this doesn’t really seem like huge news. This move toward compatibility has been ongoing anyway.

4) The thing that gets repeated over and over throughout the press release is the mutual affirmation not to kill each other over patents. And this is what I find a little weird about the whole thing. For the number of times this was mentioned and the lack of detail in why this is so important, it feels like a red herring to me. I wonder if this was designed to ward off or compromise on certain actions the companies may have been considering against each other. Here is a point on the monetary side of things from the press release

“Under the patent cooperation agreement, both companies will make upfront payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each other’s patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft’s product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.”

Jason Matusow writes in his blog:

“What it really means is that customers deploying technologies from Novell and Microsoft no longer have to fear about possible lawsuits or potential patent infringement from either company.”

I wonder how much customers really had this fear. It seems like such a fear surfaced for a little and a number of companies began offering indemnification programs for open source solutions. But that faded rather quickly. Perhaps because the threat isn’t real enough to pick up many clients. I don’t remember exactly how this went, but the last LinuxWorld Expo I attended, there was a session in which conversation shifted toward the legal aspects of just how real or likely such lawsuit threats were. The opinion seemed to be that they were mostly FUD. Considering how “successful” ones like the SCO case are, it doesn’t seem like this has had a huge impact to many customers. Yet here Novell is, apparently ready to make royalty payments to Microsoft based on open source solutions it sells and so I am reminded of Mitch Ratcliffe’s comments again (which I cited above), where he likens the agreement to Dracula’s modus operandi.

In all of this, nobody hesitates to point out that this may be, at least in part, a response to Oracle and its recent Red Hat move–competitors to Microsoft and Novell. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch has an insightful write-up about this. If there’s going to be a dominant enterprise Linux platform, Novell would certainly rather have SUSE be the one and I’d expect Microsoft can only stand to gain by appearing aligned with a strong distribution that could give it comparable access to enterprise customers using Linux.

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Addendum – 22:51

The red herring of this deal that I mentioned I suspected, may have been revealed by Bruce Perens. He theorizes that this is actually a means for Microsoft to set up the conditions for an environment, which enables it to sue. It would seem to need some “correct” paths available before pursuing patent suits against Free software systems.

“Even if everyone were to be protected regarding software that Novell distributes, there’s the tremendous collection of Free Software that they don’t distribute. A logical next move for Microsoft could be to crack down on “unlicensed Linux”, and “unlicensed Free Software”, now that it can tell the courts that there is a Microsoft-licensed path. Or they can just passively let that threat stay there as a deterrent to anyone who would use Open Source without going through the Microsoft-approved Novell path.”

That’s quite a strategy. Except there is some question as to whether Novell would still be able to even offer something under a GPL license. Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing how this could ever truly be that effective. A GNU/Linux system has many heads, which appear in a widely dispersed environment of physical and virtuals realms, governed by a multitude of laws that are not all US-based, and embraced by many people that just don’t need to care. I don’t see them all being cut off.

Odyssey of the Oracle Hero

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A few years ago, during the dot-com era, I had an idea for a lyric poem. I thought, Larry Ellison, you have more money than you’ll ever use, why not pay me to shadow you for a year. And I’ll write a lyric poem about you.

In the old days Homer went around recording the deeds of heroes. That’s what mattered to society back then. But in our time, the dot-com era catapulted the CEO and business luminaries into the spotlight. I wouldn’t blame the frenzy that happened during that time for creating the situation. The drive for continual profit increase, as anyone who pays attention to the way investors respond to earnings calls, will notice, is dominant. It tints much of what takes place in the world. Hear me here, my purpose in this post is not to judge the value, positive or negative, that this has. I’m only noting the phenomenon.

With that in mind, the people that were once raised as the ultimate ideal to aspire to, heroes, I think have been traded for CEOs. While heroes’ deeds were sung at length, nowadays it’s the CEOs’ exploits which are repeated, discussed, pondered, marvelled at, mimicked, feared, and sometimes frowned upon. There were stories of the wild indulgence of some, the underhanded spying of others, and the bombastic beatings others gave competitors. I’ve read about them, and followed the stories.

Who knows, maybe this era is on the cusp of changing and the value given the CEO is shifting in the public’s perception. One might argue with fall-from-grace exemplified in the activities of the Enrons and HPs that that is indeed what is happening. Maybe other milieus of society are rising in the public mindset. Maybe this change is the ideal situation to write a damn good tragedy. Where would the hero be without some tragedy and misfortune and the whimsy of fate? Perhaps the new hero figure will still be business related except changes in business strategies in the software industry, such as those brought about by Free and open source software developments are modifying the locus of our focus (they’ll be called SABDFLs). :-)

Anyway it’s the beginning of November, which means Nanowrimo has begun and I’m once again participating. If Mr. Ellison wants his deeds immortalized in a lyric poem, now would be the time to call me.