I know Dan, the journalist, he is one of those clever guys that I keep briefing but who never really writes anything about us :) I talked to him last week about the IBM announcement but he kept coming back with a line of questioning around "OSS can't innovate". He was working on that article already.

Of course McVoy gets teared to shreds by the script kiddies on slashdot for claiming that developers should make a living and that creating innovative software requires pay. I must admit that I actually think a lot like McVoy on some of the points he makes. I am not all doom and gloom like he is, in fact I KNOW that the professional open source business model works and will argue that POSS is inevitable as a business model. However after 5 years of professional open source, I know how hard it is to do and how frustrating the "opinions" of many clueless so called "OSS advocates" can be.

Making a living at OSS is tricky, taxing and leaves me wondering at night. We pulled it off and are making money at about 130 employees but it is a trick. We are destroying value for over-priced software vendors who’ve been milking the licensing system for the past 30 years— we create tons of value for the IT consumer—and whether or not we participate in this wave it is happening anyway— this sort of whining by McVoy is like people complaining about the horse and buggy business going down hill because of the invention of the rail-road. AS LONG AS THE MODEL IS SELF SUSTAINED ECONOMICALLY, the system is defendable.

One of the arguments detailed in the thread is about getting hourly pay for consulting services. Namely, write the core software for free and then pimp yourself for hourly wages. Honey, get me my gun! The communists are on our lawn! This line of thinking could turn software developers into the equivalent of low paid burger flipping slaves, which would be bad obviously. If we end up, as a professional category, as highly paid hourly professionals, say like doctors or lawyers in the US then that would be good but still it would be a far cry from the fortunes that were made in the license model.

30 years ago Bill Gates III wrote the vribrant "open letter to hobbyists" , I reread this last week and I can't say how much I RELATE to the points made by BillG, which incidently are exactly the same as the points made by McVoy. Namely that developers that are writing great software should get great pay and that it is a good thing for the industry to have full time dedicated people. Developers working for free is still a romantic deception embraced both by the press in general and the developers THEMSELVES. Why this is so controversial (developers require pay) really puzzles me, maybe it is human nature to cling onto romantic deceptions and ideologies?

I get pissed off everytime I have to articulate this but it is surprising how many people believe open source is about free development, for the umpteth time FREE SOFTWARE != FREE DEVELOPERS.

Some business people don't get that point, which is funny because it is about money, I am growing convinced that the developers that flame on this topic are either burnt out hackers who don't want anyone to make money or kiddies in college where communism still looks good since mom and dad are the ones paying for the rent and the groceries.

You can only go so far as a hobbyist. Some people wrongly assume that all software can be done on a volunteer basis, and they usually point to Linux as an example of software that compounded over time, without financing, into something decent. The thinking goes that if you give enough time to OSS then you will achieve the same result as dedicated professional full time teams. Also Linux has not innovated as much because the target was to copy Unix—this is not the case with OS middleware…

Here at JBoss, we are exploring a particular strand of self-sustained software production in open source. Our revenue scalability is non-linear with people (that is good). The important question all the business models are addressing is "IS THE OSS SOFTWARE BUSINESS MODEL ONLY A LOSS-LEADER MODEL OR CAN IT BE A SELF-SUSTAINED AND PROFITABLE ENTITY".

See, when it comes to philosophy I am much much closer in spirit to MSFT, which says that developers should make money, tons of it if possible. IBM on the other hand says that developers should wag their tails for low wages and IBM laptops. IBM today, just as they did 40 years ago, still sees software as a tactical loss leader-- something to make hardware and services palatable. OSS development is funded by profits coming from elsewhere, hardware, services, govt and proprietary software. We, and others like MySQL, continue to prove that professional open source is a standalone category.

As a counter point to McVoy though I will argue that OSS has a track record of proven innovation. While it is true that OSS thrives in commoditized, standardized environments (Posix, HTTP, SQL, J2EE), professional OSS also sustains innovation. We at JBoss provide anecdotal evidence of this with work like AO/EJB3/Hibernate/JBossPortal/JBossCache. There is tremendous work done in the open source community, pushing the state of the art in terms of technology and this is particularly true of the Java camp. We drive innovation and standardization.

I believe that some of the innovation comes from the OSS licenses themselves by allowing tighter feedback loops with our users that then become contributors to the code base. To me open source is a powerful model because of the community of USERS.

But the point remains that to do this seriously, professionally, in a sustainable fashion you need to make a living. What is clearly compromised imho is the "instant billionaire" club. I remember the first time I saw Torvalds on a panel and someone asked "why isn't there an open source billionaire", and I immediately thought "cause you are distributing FREE SOFTWARE dummy why else?"... and there still isn't an open source billionaire today. There are very few billionaires period. Your average MSFT developer certainly isn’t one, maybe Paul Allen…millionaires are an achievable category in OS and for JBoss.

I for one, don't believe there will ever be an open source billionaires club, there are and will be many multi-millionaires though. If we execute on our plan without screwing up, we will create a large batch of OS millionaires… we care about the developers and people who create real value in companies getting rewarded.

We never saw OSS, passion and money as being mutually exclusive. We aim to have it all.

marcf

So today was one of those days that you always remember. Let's see, I got up at around 8:30 and was at the office at around 9AM. Then my cell phone started going crazy and very quickly I knew something was wrong. I went through the rolodex of paranoid scenarios that I have in my head and remembered the "IBM will buy Gluecode" rumor we had heard through two sources. Sure enough, IBM bought Gluecode.

First things first, regarding IBM's move, this is quite the PR coup.

This clearly says "IBM wants to kill JBoss". After months of claiming that they don't see JBoss on their radar, they go out and do a highly strategic deal that is squarely aimed at slowing our momentum down. See, it is pretty obvious that the situation with open source has gotten a little bit out of hand. When we came out with our number one market share, I wondered how IBM would react in order not to not to lose the distribution wars against us. IBM is deathly afraid of mass distribution plays in their market. They have their own paranoid history with Microsoft and OS/2. We believe this is a repeat of the OS/2 play :) In this case, IBM is starting with Apache Geronimo, which has become a running joke among open source and industry cognoscenti--with few downloads, little development activity and no community to speak of.

This is also, and perhaps more importantly, a huge move against BEA. It says "Open Source is the here and now;" it validates the model and now customers KNOW that OSS is here to stay, whether with us at JBoss or IBM or anybody else for that matter. It will happen. The inevitable rise of open source beyond Linux has today been validated by IBM.

And finally, with this move, IBM is definitely giving the finger to Sun. That one cracks me up. You remember the movie "The Usual Suspects" and that heist they do on the New York police department? Well, I got to hand it to IBM for craftiness because this is the most aggressive standards stance I have seen them take against Sun. If IBM controls volume distribution in middleware, Sun and the Java Community Process will go the way of the dinosaurs. I actually believe IBM has just forced Sun's hand.

So let's talk about that. This move is so funny and its ramifications so far reaching that it boggles the mind. First the obvious stuff. NO ONE wants IBM to have a monopoly on Java standards and distributions. That will consolidate a lot of people around JBoss. I believe that this will likely turn into a net positive for us. WE are the leaders, the number one marketshare. The business model makes sense and we don't have conflicts of interest like IBM does. WE are a clean play. IBM has a vested interest in keeping their open source offering an inferior product. Already we are seeing "bait and switch" slides spewing out of IBM. They are trying to position this as the "low end" and Websphere as the "high end". The market is tired of fake open source.

JBoss today controls the low-end mass distribution market and is a serious player in the very high end. We have one message around one platform and THAT IS the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS). Bottom line we are not worried on the product set end. We are offering the OSS SUPER-PLATFORM. We will continue to gain traction and leverage our number one marketshare. While we are focused on improving developer productivity with our work on simplifying Enterprise Java at the EJB3 standards level and in our own JEMS product suite, IBM's announcement adds complexity for their customers and partners, not simplicity.

We have very solid relationships with HP and Novell and our other partners. As most of you know (and this is also for our employees) we are committed to staying independent and profitable, but the net-net is that this move by IBM could very well strengthen our position in the market overall.

Time will tell, but this is actually fun. JBoss was born with a target on its back and thrived in what was a hostile environment. If evolution has anything to teach us, it is that hostile environments accelerate mutations and natural selection favors the fittest organisms. We are the leaner, faster party, with the true professional open source community base. This move on IBM's behalf will send us into over-drive.

Today will go down as the day IBM came out of the woods and declared its intentions against us. I want to welcome them to the party, open source is a difficult business model and terrain. On the competitive front, we are the established player and this is our turf. If they are ready for war on our turf, then fine, bring it on!

I subscribe to Nature Magazine, the "international weekly journal of science" which is basically weekly porn for scientists. This week's title is "Cache transactions" and under the very sexy picture of a HOTHEAD mutated plant.

The subtitle is "non-mendelian inheritance in arabidopsis" and it is apparently an important proofpoint in the world of evolution. My rough understanding of the paper significance is as such: basically DNA has inheritance mechanisms built in that goes beyond what you inherit from your dad and mom hence the "non-mendelian".

Here is the abstract:

Genome-wide non-mendelian inheritance of extra-genomic information in Arabidopsis. A fundamental tenet of classical mendelian genetics is that allelic information is stably inherited from one generation to the next, resulting in predictable segregation pattens of differing alleles. Although several exceptions to this principle are known, all represent specialized cases that are mechanistically restricted to either a limited set of specific genes (for example mating type conversion in yeast) or specific types of alleles (for example alleles containing tranposons or repeated seqauences). Here we show that Arabidopsis plants homozygous for recessive mutant alleles of the organ fusion gene HOTHEAD (HTH) can inherit allele-specific DNA sequence information that was not present in the chromosomal genome of their parents but was present in previous generations. This previously undescribed process is shown to occur at all DNA sequence polymorphisms examined and therefore seems to be a general mechanism for extra-genomic inheritance of DNA sequence information. We postulate that these genetic restoration events are the result of a template-directed process that makes use of an ancestral RNA-sequence cache.

In plain english, they detected alleles that can skip a generation. The alleles were not present in the N-1 generation, the physical allele, we are not just talking about a recessive trait here which would yield a 25% mutant population from a 0% expressed parent population, just like 2 brown eyed parent with grand parent with blue eyes have one chance in four to yield blue eyed babies. Here the physical bytes are gone in the N-1, were present in the N-2 and are present in the N generation. The population of mutant arabidopsis plants yielded a 3% reversion rate of the chromosome bearing HOTHEAD. That reversion is the result.

Then they *postulate* (no direct evidence of that mechanism) that essentially nature does "versioning" of its DNA. So that a random mutation can be reversed if it has negative effects. In the article they argue that metabolic stress is the feedback mechanism (the plant has all its organs fused together) and the plant knows "something is wrong" and will revert the DNA blueprint to the cached one. What is puzzling here for the genomists is that there is no direct evidence of the existance of this "master versioned copy" and it is not chromosomal DNA, by definition. Hence the postulate that the most likely candidate is some cache of RNA from the ancestors.

Basically they are zeroing in on the equivalent of a database for DNA :)

The reason I am so interested in genomics as they relate to evolution is that software and biology share the same interest in maintenance of complex systems. It used to be that biologists would come to software. I am tempted to do the reverse :) We know, in the software field, that the best way to maintain and evolve large systems is to modularize them by "aspectization". Yes here I come again with AO.

The first time I realized that all current mendelian/darwinistic approaches start *WITH A GRAPH OF SPECIES* that is very akin to the inheritance graph of object I immediately thought of aspects. We know that parent-child inheritance graphs are inherintly brittle when it comes to large OO systems maintenance. Nature is the perfect example of a complex system that needs continuous maintenance. For example how do you code for a new adaptive feature under stress. Wouldn't it be nice if this snippet of DNA was weaved in the mass by other means than inheritance, which is very slow. Mendelian inheritance in this scenario would basically KILL a large part of the population, that don't have the solution, except those that are lucky enough, through random mutation, to find it. Aspects deal with that distribution in software by being able to dynamically weave code in the original class/specie.

For example, let's take the case of a new SQL injection attack, the AO line of defense would be to deploy aspects to every JDBC drivers in your domain to patch the connections. The "parent" JDBC driver, may not have that feature built in its DNA but you can easily deploy the "good virus" to inject its protection pattern in the driver, simply filtering the SQL commands flowing through. This is by the way research we are following in academia.

One missing link becomes the packaging, we know how to deploy aspects in jars today in software, but exactly how does nature do that? The notion of "transposons" is an interesting one. It has been shown that DNA can self inject itself into a host. Think of it as the weavers (bytecode manipulation) of nature. Some research points to "viruses". Forget for a second the ones that get you sick or the ones that infect your laptop. 99.999% of viruses are actually benign. It has been proven that DNA from the virus could be weaved in the host DNA. That type of insertion of code is the same as what aspects do. In other words the advice code would fuse with the target code, essentially inlining, so that the subsequent copies (class) would have the data through inheritance even though it was weaved in extra-inheritance at some point.

I don't know, it makes a wholota sense to me :)

These theories are actually very controversial, kind of like AO, and not everyone is sold on them. But that is why I like science, what the paper proves for real is that there IS code weaving other than mendelian whatever that mechanism is. That today is a fact, we just don't know what it is yet. So have I been fascinated by this article and will be scouting for an interesting article along these lines in the future.

Anyway, I thought this different definition of "cache transactions" would amuse many of you, funny what nature has in store... Anyone want to put some money on the fact that she uses AO? :)

remember she loves you, or maybe she doesn't care, but she sure does pretty work

marcf

Here is one for the press! Thank you for this week's coverage.

I am proud of nathalie, who runs our PR. On top of taking care of our 3 kids (including the monster twins) here is the press coverage for the week.

NewsForge, "La Quinta reserves room for JBoss" (March 24)
Java.About.com, "Introduction to EJB" (March 24)
CNET, "Novell tweaks management tools" (March 23)
 *Also appeared in ZDNet
IT World Canada, "Novell bets big on Identity Management" (March 23)
Computerwire, "Novell targets Linux at small businesses" (March 23)
ADTmag.com, "Is Eclipse the Commercial IDE Killer?" (March 23)
Computerwire, "JBoss expands Apache support" (March 22)
ZD Net Blog, "JBoss shows how to profit in open source, part 1" (March 22)
ZD Net Blog, "JBoss shows how to profit in open source, part 2" (March 22)
eChannel Line, "JBoss expands support services for Apache" (March 22)
ADTmag.com, "JBoss Inc. Lays Groundwork for JBoss Ecosystem" (March 22)
CRN, "Novell's Next Linux Server, Desktop In The Pipeline" (March 22)
 *Also appeared in Informationweek
Computerworld, "Novell to add more open-source to extend, Novell and JBoss tighten their relationship" (March 22)
Computerworld, "Q&A: Novell CEO touts Linux, identity products" (March 22)
SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, "Novell CEO dismisses analyst report at BrainShare" (March 22)
LinuxWorld.com, "Today's IT Solutions Need to Be "Open, Secure and Global," Says Novell's Messman" (March 22)
NewsForge.com, "Novell's BrainShare 2005: Day 2" (March 22)
DesktopLinux.com, "Novell shares Linux plans in annual tradeshow keynote" (March 21)
eChannelLine.com, "Novell: we're all about Linux and identity" (March 21)
InformationWeek, "Novell Expands Linux And Identity-Management Strategies" (March 21)
 *Also appeared in WebServicesPipeline
Open Enterprise Trends, "BEA's Vision for Eclipse' Web Tools Project" (March 21)
 
 
So again thanks to all of you that have covered the news and included Jboss references.
 
I wanted to focus for one second on the significance of the Novell announcement. I attended Brainshare, Novell's annual user conference with 7000 attendees. The announcement was 3 fold
 
 
Novell will contribute to JEMS development. Novell will first contribute to Jboss Portal by open sourcing large portions of their own portal offering. We made serious announcements at JBossWorld that Portal was going to accelerate quickly and this is part of it, they will be donating 70 portlets and dedicate some of their best developers to contribute to JEMS. And you ain't seen nothing yet, portal is about to go lightspeed, we are just getting warmed up, stay tuned :)
Novell will OEM JEMS. This announcement was done within their identity team. They will build their system on top of JEMS, thus replacing eXtend (ex-silverstream) as the basis for their products.
Novell will support JEMS. This is very much like the HP announcement we did last year (which landed us on the cover of the wall street journal) except that Novell is supporting all of JEMS not just JBossAS and Tomcat. It is significant because it continues to grow our partner ecosystem with established players that take us to market on a worldwide basis.
 
So all in all it was a good week for us. Our channels team has been firing on all cylinders this year, and for a 105 employees company we are getting some serious traction. During Messman's (novell's CEO) presentation, he mentioned 10 times Jboss and then a camera filmed me on screen (I was in the first row), I think I blushed as I realized 7000 people watched. So everyone would recognize me as I was walking through the show. People from the conference would smile and stop me and say hiand talk. They were really happy to see us there they all felt that Novell was cool again. Open source has such a cool factor attached to it that I guess it rubs off on other people. That was truly gratifying as they were grateful. Even one local guy in Salt Lake City, on the street, asked me if novell was "bankrupt" and I said it was "alive and kicking", the guy seemed truly happy about that saying that "that is positive energy".
 
The analyst community got it. One financial analyst asked if "1- Novell was taking a leadership position in open source 2- if it was big enough to pull it off". It was kind of funny to see the Novell execs struggle with that one. I mean as far as soft ball questions go, that was a soft ball. And yet, they struggled. Had it been me I would have jumped and said "yeah! and you bet yeah!". The true answer is "yes and no, but it doesn't matter". I mean between the acquisitions of Suse, and ximian novell is clearly taking a leadership position. Also because Novell is not alone in backing Jboss it doesn't depend just on Novell for this to succeed, the ecosystem includes the likes of HP. A better question would have been "is the ecosystem big enough to pull this through" and the answer there is yes.
 
Anyway, they also treated us like royalty, taught us a lesson on how to treat your partners and customers (we really felt special) and it was all in all a very enjoyable 2 days. I don't know if it was something with the air, or Salt Lake City itself or the way they treated us, but I felt truly happy and at peace walking through the streets. An overwhelming feeling I hadn't felt in 15 years. It was good.
 
Tada,
 
marcf

I am still on the road so I will make this a quickie, I need to leave for the airport in 10 minutes (I am at novell brainshare where we announced a big partnership, more on that later) but these 2 articles caught my eye.

I am so proud of this article

Don’t let CTO Scott Stark’s outfit fool you. That’s authentic JBoss swag he’s sporting. JBoss runs what it calls the Professional Open Source Model. It ‘combines the cost savings benefits of open source with the development methodologies, support, and accountability expected from enterprise software vendors.’ Easier said than done. But have a gander at the whole JBoss management team. These are software pros. Proof of success came this week, at Novell’s Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City. Novell is handing the keys of its middleware car to JBoss. This was not done lightly. Novell spent heavily three years ago to buy SilverStream, renaming its products exteNd. Novell now plans to co-develop the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) and ship a number of its components as part of the 2006 exteNd release. For JBoss it’s distribution and development support in one deal. That’s how the open source pros do it.

I don't know why but I am truly proud of Scott. For those who don't know (I didn't) "swag" means "confidence". "That is how the open source pros do it", yeah, dammit, yeah! walk around with our head high, we made it. The company we built is a machine today, it is working today, it is in orbit, beating numbers month after month and stiking key partnerships like the HP and novell ones.

A second article gave a good overview of the JBoss federation effort, which we announced at JBoss world, and for your reference I am including it here.

Between JBossWorld and the love shown at Novell's brainshare, I have replenished my emotional batteries, it felt just great and I will try to blog in more detail about this soon.

Remember we love you,

marcf

In this article, RedHat's Michael Tiemann says:

"One of the mistakes we made when we launched this Enterprise Linux product was we focused so exclusively on this enterprise market that we left this (early-adopter customer) square uncovered," Tiemann said. "It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation."

I was surprised when RH made the announcements around the Fedora/RHEL split. I thought it was long term suicide for the benefit of short term profit. Let me explain. OSS businesses thrive on the distribution reach OSI licenses afford them. In other words, JBoss incurs a 20c cost of sales for every dollar in maintenance, where proprietary vendors incur a $2.5 COS for every dollar. This, by the way is why the model works, we can do R&D without the licenses.

Limiting access to the "real distribution" seemed non-sensical. Let people use your stuff and then turn them on. The way I rationalized the decision by RH was based on branding. That essentially RH had enough of a brand and market presence, 85% in the US. I think they thought they could get away with it. I still saw it as the best way to alienate your user base as Michael now acknowledges.

On the positive side, since RH went to a proprietary distribution model (you really have to buy their distro to use it) they made tons of cash and became profitable (GAAP) which is an impressive feat given that 5 years ago they were still in the packaging/barnes and noble distribution model.

Another point Tillman makes is around innovation. We couldn't agree more. Keeping your projects viable and alive is something we focus on at JBoss. All the projects under "professional open source" management that are part of JEMS, be it Tomcat, JBoss AS or Hibernate, are the REAL products, no split, I think this is a lot cleaner. We want the open project to yield enterprise open source quality though our "Professional Open Source" methodology, it is that simple. We sponsor the actual projects as our main expense in R&D.

We selected our VC about a year ago, and one big component was "did they get it". Some would walk in and start talking about "taking the product proprietary" or offering "enterprise versions". We would walk away. I am glad this article by Tiemann validates our choices,

marcf

OK the critics of the "professional open source" model just reached a new low. It is funny how everyone has an opinion of how open source should work. Not that these people actually CONTRIBUTE anything significant to open source but they still have an OPINION of how OSS should be run.

In that particular entry, the opinion seems to be that the developers who create OSS should work regular jobs and develop OSS on a volunteer basis. How dare we consider offering services around our own creations?

But what was sad and DISGUSTING to me was when I read that the critic runs " a consulting company specializing in Apache, Tomcat, and Cocoon consulting, support, and training services." I almost wanted to cry. Meaning that JBoss helps this guy make money by sponsoring Tomcat and being the lead developers. We pay for that development, he makes money off of it.

So this guy is in the business of suckling on the success of OSS projects. JBoss like models piss him off when we offer these services from the source since we cut into his potential markets...and profits in order to pay our own developers and R&D and bring that PIG professional open source grade software like Tomcat 5.5...

The disgusting hypocrisy of it all made me feel sick.

marcf