• Open Source is mainstream and it’s being used extensively to support customer facing, business and mission critical functions.
• Reduced TCO and no up-front license cost are still the major drivers for open source adoption but they’re closely followed by - vendor independence (and specifically MS independence), Quality, Innovation and Convenience / Flexibility. Or as Forrester [1] put it “OSS isn’t just cheap – it’s good and cheap”.
• The main inhibitors to adoption – ‘security’ and ‘lack of support’ and risk of patent / copyright infringement seem to be much less of a concern than a year ago. The suggestion seems to be that these risks are offset by working with commercial open source vendors or experienced System Integrators.
• The rate of Open Source adoption differs between categories of software – Application Development, Server OSes, Databases and Middleware have high adoption whereas Reporting / BI, SOA, Desktop and Security – adoption is much lower but adoption is moving rapidly up the stack.
• North America and Canada are  still behind Europe (excluding the UK) in adopting OSS; adoption is higher in larger organizations; and different industries are adopting OSS at different rates for different areas in the stack.
• Technology isn’t the only thing being adopted – principles and governance of open source is also being adopted in IT and development organizations. This is something I’ve already witnessed a few times.

OK, a little bit more detail from each of the reports.

The first report was prepared for Bull by Forrester [1], and specifically focusses on European and North American companies who have already adopted OSS. I especially like the following, so forgive the repetition :

OSS isn’t just cheap — it’s good and cheap. Only a minority of respondents said that OSS hasn’t met their quality expectations. A vast majority (i.e., 92%) said that their quality expectations have been met or even exceeded. The satisfaction regarding cost was on a similar level at 87%.”

The second report is Actuate’s annual Open Source survey [2]

I’ve only read the North American report and a I presume there’s more detail specific to France, UK and Germany. The report drills down into established open source technologies – Linux, Eclipse, Tomcat and JBoss and it’s nice to see JBoss included along with other Open Source mega-brands like Apache, Linux, MySQL and Eclipse . JBoss adoption in North America is 14.7% and Germany 22.1%  but in France it’s much lower at only 5.7% – while other technologies remain pretty constant. Any thoughts as to why JBoss adoption is so much lower in France or whether this is a bug in the survey  ?

The third and fourth tomes are from IDC [3,4] The first part outlines the key drivers and inhibitors to the adoption of Open Source.  The second part has some very nice detail on how open source technology is ‘acquired’ and how it’s supported and serviced. It demonstrates how a tiny little company called  Red Hat has managed to compete with and in many cases lead some much more established (ie. older) and significantly larger companies in the distribution and support of Open Source technology. That said – you can’t help but accept that without huge companies like IBM, Oracle and HP – distributing and supporing Open Source technology – it wouldn’t be as successful or as established as it is today.

As I keep saying – money makes the world go round and that’s true for the world of Open Source too.

[1] Open Source Paves The Way For The Next Generation Of Enterprise IT, Forrester Consulting, November 2008

[2] ACTUATE / Survey Interactive :Annual Open Source Survey, North America Edition, 2008

[3] IDC 2008 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 1 : Usage Drivers and Inhibitors

[4] IDC 2008 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2 : Project Adoption

Both releases are available immediately from Red Hat Network.

Red Hat Application Stack 1.4
Release Notes, Errata

Red Hat Application Stack 2.2
Release Notes, Errata

Congratulations to the ‘stacks’ team on another on-target release.

I promised myself I wouldn’t bite; yet here I am. I’m contributing to the “Here’s what Sun should do meme”. And why not -  I’m as good a keyboard-CEO as the next person and I did work for Sun for almost 9 years.

But first I should note – I think Tim Bray was pretty bold starting this (as he’s still a Sun Employee); and Sun is a pretty unique company in that it’s OK to do what Tim did (assuming Tim didn’t get booted).

#1 Java. I’m part of the Java ecosystem so it’s important to me. Basically, do what James says:

…, at worst go back to SUNW as a stock ticker.”

then do what Tim says :

As for Sun’s role as Steward of Java, and in particular the Java Community Process, let it go already. Java has mostly won and is mostly the establishment, and the community is smart and conservative enough to keep anyone from doing what Microsoft tried last millennium, or in any other way to subvert Java’s interoperability. In 2008, the JCP is costing Sun opportunities and friends and gaining us very little that I can see.

So I’d like Sun to set the JCP free, turn it over to the community, and when we develop some cool Java-based technology in-house, take it to market, try to make some money with it, and after it’s caught on and the bugs are shaken out, consider whether or not it ought to be taken to the JCP.”

But the community is going to have to continue to be smart and I also think that a consortium of interested parties would have to step up and invest some resources in making it work really well. Getting the balance of commercial interest and community is the key – I think Eclipse has it about right. Money makes the world go round – sorry if that offends anyone. Oh and while we’re at it – OpenJDK should be treated like the Linux Kernel – we only need one code base (note IBM and Oracle).

#2 NetBeans

I’ve used both Net Beans and Eclipse (not for a year or two mind) – Net Beans is better, more polished, etc. But it doesn’t matter – it’s not a sustainable product. When Sun stops it’s investment – it will fade away. Eclipse won in mind share years ago; Sun should have recognized this in 2005 – I did. Java needed something like NetBeans in 1999 to attract developers but not anymore.

#3 Solaris

See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

#4 Middleware

Sun has some great products and technology; some that are popular and fit well with Sun’s demand driven model (eg. Glassfish) and some that make money (Identity Management). Figure out what you need to do #5 – choose the best available OSS solution and run with it.

#5 MySQL

Invest, Innovate. Hire sales people who can sell data-based solutions – steal $1bn from Oracle this year, $2bn next year, repeat.

Demand for storing, archiving, cleaning, replicating and accessing data is going to grow. Forever.

#6 Storage, SPARC, Volume Servers

Keep only what is required for #5.

#7 Open Office

I’m a beneficiary of Open Office – I use it exclusively but have never paid a penny. That’s the problem – I use it because it’s free and it’s the best Office Suite available for Linux. There is no business case here. Thanks for a great product though.

#8 Java FX

Drop it. Nobody will notice.

If this sounds depressing – I’m sorry but it should be clear that Sun isn’t going to be the company it was in 1999. It needs to adjust its cost-model inline with its Open Source strategy; it needs to be much smaller; and needs to do much, much less, much, much more sucessfuly. Even if Sun goes private.

IDC have just released their RDBMS Vendor Share for 2006. (sorry – you need to be an IDC client or shell out some money to get the report). As you would imagine the numbers are pretty big. The revenue leader with 44% is Oracle and that amounts to a stunning $7.3b (which probably doesn’t include some of the peripheral tooling and doesn’t include support and services revenue).

MySQL aren’t in the report (not a mention) because IDC vendor share reports are based purely on license revenue and MySQL’s revenue would have been too small to make the list; let alone the amount attributed to pure license revenue. On the whole IDC reports contain great data but I’ve long wished that they would catch up with the rest of the world and recognize the importance of footprint / installed base growth rather than pure revenue growth – anyone reading IDC reports might think the FOSS movement had never happened.

OK, back to RDBMS. The interesting thing to note, is that Oracle attributed a lot of their growth to the SMB segment and Microsoft reported the best growth (25% from 2005-2006). These two data points suggest that the demand for RDBMs in smaller businesses is pretty hot right now – and that should be great news for Sun / MySQL.