RTWaaS?

A giant hurdle for buying a system/solution as a software is the need to buy hardware, install it, configure and manage it. You need to train people on the products’ operational aspects and retain that skill within the company.

(Free) Open Source Software (FOSS) is great to spread, to get adoption and support for a product. You enable the developers and architects to play around with the stuff! The real challenge for FOSS (and other software) products is to go beyond the happy and content developer and also provide a painless path for the adopters to provide business value without a huge investment hurdle in terms of hardware, software, traning or services.

I think the reason why something like Google Analytics or Salesforce.com is successful is that it is extremely painless to start using it. You can focus on the business problem rather than the IT stuff. Obviously this is nothing new, and the examples I gave has been around for years. Software as a Service is great.

Then, you have all the talk about the real-time web and putting information quickly, as it happens – “real time” – on the users’ desktops. This is what Twitter and Facebook is about, but real-time web is also needed for e-commerce and gaming and a lot of other areas. There are even conferences about it, so it must be happening

Lastly, the final piece of the puzzle are Service Level Agreements. In order to provide “real time web” messaging as a service there is a clear advantage of being close to the information consumers, both in terms of scaling out and in terms of guaranteed latency. I think it is going to be hard to commit meaningful SLA:s without being in the edge.

If you remove the need to invest in infrastructure, the need to train people on the operational aspects and then get excellent scalability and low latency guaranteed by contract, I’d buy it in a second. Who will provide me with the Real Time Web as a service?

Oracle kills Open Source Java with a really big rock?

Being known as the guy that called Oracle evil in a blog post, I feel I gotta comment on today’s announcement that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems for 7.4 billion US dollars. As you can imagine, I’m not very optimistic.

What does the deal really mean to the Open Source Java community? Isn’t this just business as usual? And wouldn’t we be worse off if Big Blue would have bought Sun a couple of weeks back?

As you might have guessed, I would have preferred IBM to buy Sun for many reasons. Perhaps the main thing is that I feel IBM has been embracing open source, whereas Oracle hasn’t. It makes all the difference. Let’s hope Oracle sees the light and doesn’t screw up everything Java!

The Sun assets at stake:
Development Tools: NetBeans
Middleware: OpenSSO, Glassfish, MySQL, Java Hotspot JVM, Java Real Time System
Consumer Technology: OpenOffice, JavaFX / JavaFX Mobile

I’ll try to describe what I think is a likely outcome of the assets above by comparing them to Oracle’s current product line and let’s see how bad this actually can get…

Sun NetBeans vs Oracle JDeveloper

This is easy – no one uses JDeveloper, and it would surprise me if Oracle didn’t bite the bullet and ditch JDeveloper for NetBeans which has become a really good (the best?) IDE recently.

Sun OpenSSO vs Oracle Access Manager

There will be no point for Oracle to invest any money in OpenSSO when they already have a good offering in their Fusion middleware suite. OpenSSO is toast.

Sun Glassfish vs Oracle Weblogic

Oracle has a stronger app server in Weblogic than Glassfish is. I think that Glassfish will be put to the axe. Quickly. Oracle is not known for giving away software and they will only open source software that is needing life support. Some recent examples include TopLink and ADF Faces.

Sun MySQL vs Oracle RDBMS

I think this is _the_ most obvious: MySQL is TheirSQL now and also R.I.P.

Sun Java Hotspot vs Oracle JRockit

Being the cynical person I am, I think Oracle can kill two birds with one stone here. One might think that Oracle would merge the two VM efforts into one, but the result might not be what you think. Let’s just assume that Oracle takes the good stuff from JRockit and puts it into the Hotspot JVM reference implementation. Is this a likely scenario? Hell no. Oracle is in the software business to make money, and if you want to run a production-grade Java Server VM, then you will have to get it from Oracle for a fee. By doing this they also effectively kill Terracotta, the only viable contender to Oracle Coherence. See, Terracotta will not run on JRockit… The consumer JVM will be named Sun JVM. Oracle will of course keep the Java Real Time VM as it’s profitable business.

OpenOffice, JavaFX / JavaFX Mobile

Oracle’s track-record in building consumers applications is, well, not great. Anyone that’s ever tried to install an Oracle product knows what I’m talking about. So I don’t think OpenOffice will survive either. On the other hand Larry may want to keep pushing it just to be a thorn in Microsoft’s side… As for JavaFX, it doesn’t really stand a chance versus Adobe – its too little, and too late. Oracle knows this and will kill it. Quietly.

So, is this good for anyone at all? Yes. Oracle and Microsoft. Everyone else loses. IBM is in a really awkward situation and JavaOne this year may be the ultimate funeral service for (free) open source Java.

Keep in mind that when Oracle says open they generally mean open standards whereas when IBM and Sun says open they generally mean free open source software.

I’ll close with a few Larry Ellison quotes from the conference call:

“Java is the foundation of the Oracle Fusion middleware and its the second most important software asset we’ve ever acquired.”

“We acquired BEA because they had the leading Java virtual machine”