• 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

Every cloud has a silver lining. There’s a common opinion that the adoption of Open Source will only increase if the world’s economies continue to weaken. [O'Reilly Radar, Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst]

Colleague Piere Fricke has written a piece for Network World on Open Source SOA – that’s Simple Open and Affordable – not just Service Oriented Architecture.

According to the Linux Foundation – Fedora 9 (the OS of choice for yours truly) would cost $10.8 billion to develop from scratch; and the Linux kernel alone would cost $1.4 billion. The summary of the report is that “Collaborative development creates enourmous economic value”. No shit Sherlock. I wonder how much money Linux or OSS in general has actually saved companies in the last 17 years.

This was only possible because a bunch of people (like Simon Phipps), inside and outside of Sun had the clarity of vision, passion and determination to actually make it happen; and in doing so increase the opportunity that Java represents for Sun and everyone else.

Don’t underestimate what courage this took. If you’re in any doubt – go tell your CxO that you want to take one of your most valuable applications; open source it and let everyone in the world benefit from your investment and hard work. Best case – you’ll get put on a medical leave of absence.

Now we just need to work on the JCP

At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.

At JavaOne in May 2007, Sun announced that the work was largely completed and so OpenJDK was launched. What was less newsworthy was the fact that on release – OpenJDK still relied on code that was encumbered – between 4 and 5 percent of the code was closed, non free source that Sun didn’t own.

Richard Stallman described the encumbered code as :

“The one last obstacle [which] remains in liberating JDK and disarming the Java Trap completely”

and rallied the FOSS and Java communities to

“… work together to replace that code with free software”

So, who would step up to the challenge of making Java truly free and open ?

In June, 2007 – Red Hat launched the IcedTea project with the goal of making OpenJDK usable without requiring any other software that is not free. That in turn would allow OpenJDK to be included in Fedora and other Linux distributions without restrictions. The IcedTea Project made use of previous work developed under the GNU Classpath Project which had been independently driving towards a free and open implementation of the Java class libraries.

This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone – The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation – in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform. As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.

The Java TCK is a complex suite of tools and documentation that verifies that Java implementations conform to the Java specification. It consists of more than 80,000 tests and over 1 million lines of code.

From here the initial plans are to make OpenJDK part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and to expand the platform support. Beyond that our plans are still evolving, but clearly this creates some great opportunities for both Red Hat and Java. For example :

• Improving Java for virtualized, hosted environments – an area where Red Hat Linux has excelled but Java has struggled.
• Optimizing the performance and scalability of the full stack of Java-based JBoss Enterprise Middleware for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux in general
• Being able to better manage the lifecycle of JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms and the Java Virtual machine on which it depends
• A more fundamental opportunity is for Red Hat to be able to increase the depth of support for the JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue working with our communities of users, customers and partners to better understand the opportunities that OpenJDK and IcedTea present to us.

Working with Sun Microsystems and the broader Open Source Java community; Red Hat’s OpenJDK team included Tom Fitzsimmons, Lillian Angel, Gary Benson, Keith Seitz, Mark Wielaard and Andrew Haley.

Tom Fitzsimmons will be at the Red Hat Summit in Boston between June 18th and 20th, so if you want to chat about the project – swing by the Exhibit Hall, grab a beer, and ask him how much fun the Java TCK testing was.

Java, Java SE, OpenJDK and Java TCK are all Trademarks of Sun Microsystems Inc.

As a recap – Marten asserts that there are two types of organization

“… organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time.”

The former (A) are willing and able to spend time to become technology self-sufficient so they can save money on support contracts; the later (B) don’t have the time to build up the expertise (or the motivation) so instead are willing to pay someone for a support contract to save time.

Savvio – refines the model a little and suggests there’s a third category (C) of organization that “… has more money than time but is used to getting what they need for free and is comfortable enough with OSS to rely on their own skills”.

Let’s step back a bit. In my experience gained over the last 10 years working for both proprietary and open source vendors – I’ve met with literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of customers and rarely have I identified an organization that would be easy to pigeon-hole into Category A or Category B (or C for that matter). What I have seen are many cases where an organization exhibits a Category A or Category B behaviour (and often both). The only place where I’ve seen a specific decision to self-support were in two extreme cases – the first – web startups who’d decided they would keep costs low and use only free (0$) software and self-support (so this was driven by less money, not more time); the second – a huge e-commerce mega-site – decided to self support Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat because a) the risk was low (ie. very stable technologies with large user base) and b) the org. had created their own branch to meet some very specific requirements – so they had gained the expertise through necessity.  Nearly everyone else I’ve spoken to is either conditioned to buy support (and just does it as a matter of routine whenever they buy a product) or have specifically identified cases where self-support (or no support) is an acceptable risk – but I’ve very rarely seen this decision made across the whole organization.

With this insight I prefer to look at the situation this way :

Importantly it’s generally at the granularity of projects (because risk is different for different projects) and it’s dynamic – ie. an organizations willingness to self-support often changes. For example a web-startup may initially choose to self-support to maintain zero / low costs; but as the application becomes more valuable to the company (ie. as they recruit real paying customers) and as they focus more on business and less on IT – the project moves up the “Support Value Gradient” (Blue).

What’s interesting is the yellow area – ie. the “Self Support Value Gradient”. In the proprietary software model – this is very small – I would argue that the ability to self support on a product  a) that has no community and; b) for which the source isn’t available is extremely limited. In reality, “No Support” is likely to be the only option. This area is largest when the technology under consideration is a) very stable; b) in widespread use; to the degree that ‘self support’ may not require any investment at all. An example, and I choose it because it’s vendor neutral is the Apache HTTP Server – it’s in widespread use and it is pretty stable. Of course – even in the case of Apache HTTP Server – as soon as you start including the various plugins, containers and tools to make it useful – you’ve now got a reasonably complex integration to maintain – depending on the profile of the deployment – the value of vendor support could still be pretty high.

At JBoss – we have a lot of ‘customers’ who are using JBoss technologies without paying Red Hat or anyone else a penny and I’m absolutely OK with that because when they do move up the “Support Value Gradient” – ie. when they see sufficient value in the use of the products and value in the services we provide – it will be a simple transition.

This is all just my opinion, based on my experience; at the end of the day commercial open source is still pretty young – so we’re all blind – trying to figure out the nature of the elephant. I also don’t think these concerns are limited to Open Source – they’re just more acute because customers / users have a choice and choice is a good thing.

Does it frustrate you that your IT department standardized on a run-time platform 7 years ago – a platform that’s big, slow and lacks the innovation you have free and open access to via JBoss. If so, read on. I might just be able to equip you with the information you need to convince the powers that be to review those decisions and make a better choice.

Organizations are increasingly building their IT infrastructure on Open Source; though some concerns still remain often perpetuated by some of the following myths :

Myth 1 – Open Source is just for Hobbyists and isn’t ready for Business Critical, Enterprise Deployments

This may have been true 7 or 8 years ago; but even then only a little bit true.  Here are some facts to consider. i) The Web – the largest piece of IT infrastructure on the planet owes it’s success to Open Source; without Open Source the Web wouldn’t exist;  ii) A recent Forrester report made it pretty clear that JBoss in particular is better quality than some existing, proprietary, large vendor products; iii) Most of the incumbent proprietary products (especially those based on Java) use a large amount of open source software already – ie. they’re a hybrid of open and closed technology.

Myth 2 – Open Source does not provide professional, mission critical support
A number of pure-play Open Source companies have attempted to build a support business around technology for which they neither have a controlling interest; nor sufficient expertise to actually “support”. Practically speaking – in open source – trying to fix a bug that your customer thinks is important requires you to have developers deeply engaged in the Open Source communities in question. Not only is Red Hat one of the largest contributors to Linux; it also maintains active commitment to many Open Source projects on JBoss.org, Hibernate.org, Seam.org, Apache and OpenJDK.

Red Hat not only provides mission critical support for Open Source but excels at it. When technical support is your most important core competency rather just a cost centre – you have to be the best in the business. Vendors with more traditional business models (ie. you pay for the software up front and pay a little extra for support) aren’t compelled to excel at support.

Myth 3 – The licensing issues related to Open Source means we can’t take the risk
Open Source licenses are confusing and you do need to be educated to understand the responsibilities and risks associated with them; just as you need to read EULA’s for traditional shrink-wrapped software. You do that right

Myth 4 – What if I choose an OSS technology and the authors stop work on it – I don’t want the maintenance burden
Hey – proprietary technologies fade away and die too ! The Open Source model acts as a Darwinian Filter – bad technology that has little or no practical utility dies; and dies pretty quickly. Because of the natural transparency of OSS there are many indicators you can look out for – activity on forums and mailing lists; pace of change (eg. release cadence); diversity of community (ie. is it dependent on one individual; one commercial organization ?); adoption – many OSS projects track and publish their download stats.

Myth 5 – Only huge, well funded proprietary companies can afford the innovation required to compete.
Over the last 10 years the open source movement has continuously demonstrated that open source collaboration is the best way to fuel technology innovation. It’s no accident that many of the companies that you’d typically associate with innovation are also strong advocates and users of Open Source – Google, Facebook, You Tube, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. From my experience – it is often the case that the pace of innovation is often too fast, giving downstream commercial companies the advantage of selective innovation – ie. they only have to take the best ideas and often have a choice of solution for a particular problem.

What other concerns do you run into ? Leave a comment and share them with everyone else and I’ll try and find an answer.

An adoption-led market needs passionate consumers. Offering great products is a start; but investing in your community and building passion for your technology and brand is equally important.

The thing is – it takes time. The community you’re nurturing today are the buyers and technology decision makers you need in two to three years time. Adoption takes time but scales well; hard-selling is quick but hard to scale.

What I think he’s discovered is that there are three phases a company goes through (or that the financial markets see) :

1. Words – become an “Open Source” company by announcing your intentions, plans and roadmaps. Wall street seems to respond favorably to such announcements.

2. Action – the words have to be backed up by some action (eg. Sun’s Open Sourcing of Solaris, Java, acquiring MySQL). And that action has to make business sense. And for Wall Street – business sense is about increasing return at some point in the future. These days – Wall Street doesn’t reward action or progress – it rewards results.

3. Sustainable, repeatable success – The plans and hard work have to result in sustained revenue growth, quarter over quarter; year over year. This Sysiphean task is common to all commercial ventures; irrespective of their affinity to Open Source.

I think the remainder of the decade will prove that Open Source (as a business model) is good for business – then we’ll see an inflection as it shifts from being a differentiator (for early adopters like Red Hat and MySQL) to being the price of entry.

NB. The Jerry McGuire “Show me the Money” scene still makes me laugh out loud.

When Red Hat acquired JBoss in 2006 – it seemed like a good fit. Red Hat we’re similarly successful in proving that Commercial and Open Source can be used in the same sentence; did its bit (along with the rest of the Linux community) to disrupt incumbents. But what happened next was unexpected to some but rather predictable; JBoss lost it’s Mojo.

Why was this predictable ? Well JBoss (like any other successful startups) worked it’s exit strategy really well – they raised the volume on their marketing efforts; leveraged the personality cult that built up around some of it’s key staffers (Marc Fleury, Bill Burke, Gavin King, to mention a few). Basically – they sold when they we’re at the top of their game (and I’m talking about perception here). Post acquisition – integration takes it’s toll; people leave, productivity takes a hit and most importantly – things go deathly quiet – the buzz that made JBoss such an attractive acquisition to it’s suitors died off. Maintaining the kind of pre-acquisition momentum just isn’t a priority post acquisition – certainly compared to the hard work of integrating one organization into another.

If you’ve been in this industry for any amount of time – I’m sure you’ve seen this scenario play out before – it’s very common – too many examples to point to. Bucking the trend and maintaining momentum post acquisition is tough and there are too few examples to point to; more’s the pity.

So, did all the good people leave JBoss ? Nope – probably not (though some did); did the technology suddenly become uncompetitive ? Nope. Did the competition seize the moment ? Maybe – GlassFish has certainly done it’s best to fill the vacuum. But fundamentally, I agree with Matt Assay – I’m sure JBoss is still healthy and active; with the caveat that they really need to pick up the momentum this year. For another perspective (and one I don’t necessarily agree with) – ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney have written the acquisition off as a failure – though they do make an interesting, cautionary point about acquiring Open Source companies in general.

“In a more connected, services-oriented world…one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire”

Bang-on Steve – couldn’t have put it better myself. Let’s see how wide the Kimono opens before Balmer get’s shy. Ick – that’s a poor choice of metaphor – sorry if I’ve spoiled your lunch.