Truth happens

Posted on by Rich Sharples

If you wander around any of Red Hat’s offices you might see this quote from Mahatma Gandhi :

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Or you may have seen this (exceptionally cool) video at one of our conferences :

Of course Gandhi wasn’t talking about JBoss or Red Hat or Open Source – but the quote is still very relevant to a company that has revolutionized the software industry. People and companies who once ignored or laughed at Linux, or JBoss’ original EJB server are now waking up to the reality that they are losing.

Given the recent presentations that JBoss’ only real competitors (IBM and Oracle) have been spreading around and the amount of work and energy they’re both expending to compete with JBoss – I think JBoss has reached a significant milestone – I think we’re at stage 3 of Gandhi’s steps to oppose the truth  – ” … then they fight you …”.

It’s flattering and inspiring to know that two companies who are literally hundreds of times the size of Red Hat are worried. Really worried. It also adds a huge amount of credibility to our business model and our technology.

What’s next ?

Tab Sweep : JBoss

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Another couple of super-busy months here at JBoss. If anything the pace of new releases and new projects is increasing. Here are some of the more prominent Community announcements I managed to bookmark :

JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

Snoracle

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I’d like to think of myself as an informed prognosticator having worked for Sun for almost 9 years; but this is prognostication nonetheless. I missed my chance to say what I thought of an IBM acquisition but I’ll start by saying – I think I preferred it – it probably would’ve been a better outcome for the things I care about.

The things I care about are the people I know who still work for Sun, the Java ecosystem, and many of Sun’s Open Source projects that I directly or indirectly benefit from – specifically MySQL (this post will live in MySQL), OpenJDK and OpenOffice.

It still seems like a strange merger – sure, Sun and Oracle have a huge shared installed based – Sun Servers + Solaris + BEA + Oracle DBMS was the killer enterprise stack for a decade – that alone gives Oracle a vice-like grip on existing customers; but that’s about the past – not the future. I think someone did the analysis and realized it’s a marginally positive move – so I don’t think this is the big technology vision realized that Oracle are trying to promote.

I’m sure a lot of people at Sun and customers of Sun are glad the uncertainty has come to an end but unfortunately it hasn’t. I’m guessing that it will take until the end of the year before Oracle tells the world what they’re keeping and what they’re dropping. FWIW – here’s my informed guess :

Storage / Servers – the press-briefing made the merger sound like it was all about the hardware (servers and storage). I just don’t see Oracle as a hardware company and they have more to loose than gain by pissing HP off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some or all the hardware got sold off to HP, Fujitsu, etc. And I think Oracle could probably recover $3.5-4 bn of their $5bn outlay by doing so.

NetBeans – I’m not changing my mind – it’s done for. Oracle has two Java IDEs already – they don’t need a third. Oracle will pick up some great tools developers to write a migration tool but that’s about it.

OpenOffice – Oracle doesn’t like M$ but I doubt they can find a fiscally rational reason to carry the torch for Open Source and at the end of the day Oracle are doing this because it makes financial sense. I think Oracle will expect “the community” to pick up the slack.

Solaris – I think they’ll milk the legacy installed base (which is huge) but the innovation won’t continue. I think there’s an interesting opportunity for Oracle to manage the migration of the last of the Solaris holdouts to Linux. They could do this by GPLing Solaris and moving some of the Solaris features to Linux; or more likely to an Oracle proprietary OS built on Linux.

Middleware – Oracle have everything Sun has – and Oracle are by and large market leaders with large market and revenue share. Sun have one or two products that might survive and certainly some components. Oracle inherit a commitment to continue to produce the Java EE RI (and others) so Glassfish *might* survive – but Oracle have demonstrated that they don’t have appetite to maintain many products in the same market (see how quickly OC4J got killed after the BEA acquisition ?)

MySQL – I think Oracle will continue to do what Sun did somewhat accidentally – namely slowly kill it off.

Java – I’m confident that Oracle won’t fix the JCP and won’t sacrifice control for the good of the ecosystem. I also think the JCP will become a battlefield for IBM and Oracle and we’ll all be the worse for it.

OpenJDK – no-body needs two JDK’s to maintain – I think Oracle would have to move some of the monitoring / diagnostics from JRockit into a proprietary OpenJDK-based platform. JRockit has a small market share but some nice features for enterprise customers.

Cloud – not that there’s much there there but I don’t expect to see Larry eating his words.

Virtualization – I don’t really understand Oracle’s virtualization strategy other than the feeling that Larry Ellison is unlikely to entertain anything that looks like it might actually save customers money on licenses.

Spring

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Spring happens pretty quickly in North Carolina; it arrives overnight and is over in a month. The speed at which everything bursts into life is incredible. So, yet again I’m a little late updating this blog’s header image.

Mainly for my own purposes – the images I use for the header are in this Fickr Set. The Spring image is a close up of a Japanese Maple in our front garden waking up after Winter.

See also Autumn and Winter (I never got around to Summer last year – this year maybe).

The best $1200 you could spend this year

Posted on by Rich Sharples

Unsurprisingly and from what I’ve seen personally – tech. conference attendance is a little light this year. But if you have some budget for attending tech. conferences – I think the combined JBoss World / Red Hat Summit (Chicago, Sept 1st-4th) could be just about the best investment you make this year.

You’ll learn about all the great tech. that Red Hat and JBoss will be shipping as well as some of the technology still in the labs. But most of all you’ll learn how Red Hat can save you and your organization money – and right now that’s got to be a smart investment.

* travel and accomodation extra

Tab Sweep : JBoss

Posted on by Rich Sharples

JBoss adding muscle to Apache CXF. We’ll be increasing our commitment to Apache CXF – in term of both resource and expertise and fully support CXF in future versions of our products. More from Alessio Saldano (JBoss WS Lead), Dan Kulp (PMC Chair for CXF) and Sacha (JBoss CTO).

Talking of Sacha – he’s just announced he’ll be leaving Red Hat. Sacha interviewed me when I joined Red Hat (just under a year ago) and I’ve enjoyed working with him – super-smart, very passionate and a genuinely nice guy – a rare combination. Good luck for the future Sacha and enjoy the break – after 8 years you deserve some R&R and time with with your family.

The JBoss Tools team delivered another major release – JBDS 2.0 and we also introduced JBDS – Portfolio Edition – which included the run-times for all the new features in JBDS 2.0.

JBoss continues to slash costs – two more customer success stories, first Covad (provider of data, voice and wireless telecommunications) who moved to JBoss from “inflexible and costly proprietary middleware software” because “That’s why we love JBoss– it allows us to do more with less,”.

IWBank (online banking and financial services) of Milan also selected JBoss because “JBoss enables us to provide more and more efficient and affordable services, which is crucial in the current economic climate”.

Finally, JBoss will be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) – you’ll have the chance to work with some of the smartest, most exerienced Open Source developers in the business. Head over to JBoss wiki if you are interested.