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I like to read a little reality injection to counter the open source hype. Open source isn't going to go away, but neither is it a monumental change that will make the Microsofts and SAPs of the world dry up and blow away. It will change some businesses in good ways, others in bad ways, and provide some new opportunities. I enjoyed Fake Steve skewering the more religious side, though I disagree with some of his conclusions in there. His new term to add to the open source lexicon is "freetard".
Seth Grimes has a writeup on Greenplum's commitment to Bizgres, which is something I've looked at a couple times myself. Rather than repeat saying what he already wrote up, I suggest checking it out at the IE blog. I've talked with them more recently so I added a couple comments to his post.
Bottom line: I'd think twice about using Bizgres in a production environment simply because of the apparently small community of users, and the minimal emphasis on Bizgres by Greenplum. If they follow through with more community support, that would alleviate my concerns.
I'm not really sure why they wanted to put this out there as a supported project, other than for research input and testing of desired features. They have a lot on their hands building the Greenplum database, let alone distracting from their core business on what, by their own admission, is a seed project that is the single-node database you scale out of with the Greenplum database.
There's going to be an open source session with some presentations, demos and networking at the Silicon Valley TDWI chapter meeting on Thursday, February 28 from 2:00 - 5:30 in San Francisco. This event is open to the public (and it's free!) but you do need to register first.
The announcement and agenda is listed below:
Attention All Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Professionals in the Silicon Valley Area
We cordially invite you to attend our upcoming TDWI Silicon Valley Chapter meeting on February 28, 2008. Come meet other local BI/DW professionals, swap business cards, share ideas, and exchange career advice while listening to quality presentations in a vendor-neutral setting, which is the hallmark of TDWI events. TDWI Chapter meetings are open to all BI/DW professionals and are FREE of charge. In addition, when you attend a TDWI Chapter meeting, you are eligible for a 10% discount towards a new, renewed, or extended TDWI Membership. Don't forget the prizes! At each event our sponsors graciously donate fantastic prizes. Past giveaways include Apple iPods, TVs, DVD Players, and more. Please see the agenda below.
When: Thursday, February 28, 2008, 2:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Where:
A.P. Giannini Theater at the Bank of America Building
555 California Street, San Francisco, CA
(Theater is on the ground floor off the California Street Entrance)
Agenda:
2:00 - 2:25 p.m. Mingle with your colleagues over light refreshments
2:30 - 2:45 p.m. Welcome, Chapter Intro, TDWI Goals
2:45 - 3:15 p.m. The State of Open Source BI - Mark Madsen
3:25 - 3:45 p.m. Vendor Demo - JasperSoft
3:45 - 4:05 p.m. Vendor Demo - Talend
4:05 - 4:20 p.m. Networking Break
4:20 - 5:15 Panel Discussion on Open Source Software moderated by Mark Madsen. The panel includese professionals from JasperSoft, Pentaho, and Talend as well as other users of Open Source technology.
5:15 - 5:20 p.m. Close
Pentaho announced yesterday that they closed $12 million in series C funding. They plan to use the money to continue expansion and product development. The company has been doing pretty well, going by the partnership and customer announcements over the past six months. Obviously the VC think the business is good enough to continue investing in its growth, a good sign for other commercial open source companies in this market.
If you aren't familiar with Pentaho, they provide open source ETL, business intelligence and related software. They've been working on an open source alternative to BI platforms like those offered by Business Objects and Cognos, er, I mean SAP and IBM.
The investors this round are Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures, in case you were wondering.
Kevin Kelly wrote an excellent article which, while not about open source, explains very well what the economics of software really are. You could read this entire piece as how to sell open source software, and why open source firms make sense. Here's an excerpt:
The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can't be copied?
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free.
If you're questioning the viability of open source businesses, or want to learn more about what can be sold, read Better Than Free.
I'm off the Open Source Think Tank now. Should be a great couple days.
I was going to write something about negative effects on open source of Microsoft buying Yahoo (I briefly mentioned this in the Intelligent Enterprise article) but I see no need to repeat what Blankenhorn and Rooney wrote at ZDNet:
"Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects."
I'm not sure if the risks of big vendors stepping on open source are over-emphasized or not. Given the nature of the GPL, it's always possible for people to jump ship and fork projects as happened with Joomla-Mambo. The question is whether key developers for projects have the means to do so, particularly when so many newer open source startups are VC funded and this is their day job.
What I find more worrisome is the potential to lose more IP (copyright or patents) to big vendors who see no problem using IP as a weapon to stifle innovation.
With Oracle's acquisition of BEA now looking like a done deal, the big question is what this means for people looking at infrastructure software. I think it will actually help the open source, because Oracle becomes less appealing in the short term.
Given the massive overlap between application servers, middleware, data integration and Fusion middleware in Oracle, this makes the overlaps and rationalizing products even worse. Oracle has acquired 41 companies in 45 months, a rate that would make the Cisco of the 90's happy. Unlike Cisco, Oracle doesn't seem to be as good at merging the acquired companies into the fold, or rationalizing the software portfolio. That could easily come back to bite them. At WSJ there's a good look into the lack of synergies in acquisitions if you're interested in reading about this in more detail.
As usual with acquisitions, new customers are likely to shy away from the company for a while. Given Oracle's incredibly slow progress (look at Fusion), that could be a long while. Open source tools provide a lower-cost option companies can use while they wait for the market to settle. And maybe when they do, they'll find that it's not such a bad choice. Maybe we'll see a pickup in MuleSource, JBoss, Tomcat, and other open source middleware as the big vendors consolidate.
Update: Matt Asay has a more detailed post describing how the Oracle-BEA deal may already be helping JBoss.
There have been IPO rumors for quite a while, but I doubt many people expected Sun to buy them. There are some details on the rationale and what Sun is doing to extend MySQL support at Jonathan Schwartz's blog.
This is a sign of maturation of open source: operating systems haven't been as central as other parts of the stack, particularly databases and middleware. Sun's investment here may be a downward sign for Red Hat and Novell, neither of which has done well beyond the operating system. Look at what's happened with JBoss since the Red Hat acquisition. There's still risk for Sun given the challenges they've had with the decline of Solaris and the hardware business.
I did like Schwartz's discussion about a problem open source companies face: startups and tech companies want open source by default, while mainstream companies want commercial support by default:
"But as I pointed out, we heard some paradoxical things, too. CTO's at startups and web companies disallow the usage of products that aren't free and open source. They need and want access to source code to enable optimization and rapid problem resolution (although they're happy to pay for support if they see value). Alternatively, more traditional CIO's disallow the usage of products that aren't backed by commercial support relationships - they're more comfortable relying on vendors like Sun to manage global, mission critical infrastructure."
Personally, I think Sun and MySQL are a good fit. MySQL is close enough to the platform that it doesn't confuse Sun, who seems to have trouble when they move very far from the base platform. MySQL gets a boost in mainstream IT visibility and legitimacy, as well as some new support and service offerings.
Update: I found this Q&A on the MySQL blogs explaining more about the acquisition. One thing I did forget was Sun's commitment to Postgres. I wonder where that's going to go? Other companies haven't been that successful making money there, so could this be something that ends Sun's Postgres support?
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) sponsored a study on open source database use in Oracle shops in September. I referenced some of their information in my open source BI/DW courses to show what I believe to be some of the issues preventing open source database adoption for data warehousing.
The study showed that most (81%) OSS databases were less than 50GB in size, but there were a handful in the 1-2T B size. Only 12% of respondents use OSS databases for data warehousing.
One of the things I've often wondered is whether the "express" databases from Oracle and IBM are effective at containing OSS databases. According to the survey (page 12) the answer is "no" . If you think about using an "express" database with a production application, you have both technical and cost considerations should you choose to do a broader deployment. If you start with open source you don't face the same limitations, so I would expect OSS to continue to erode share at the lower end as well as capturing more new application development done inside IT.
Check out the study for yourself. It isn't specific to data warehousing and has some interesting information about other areas like adoption trends, application and application server use.
Downward price pressure from open source on the general software market hasn’t been as significant as expected. You don’t see Oracle dropping the price on their applications, or IBM lowering the price of DB2, due to open source. At least not yet. Outside of a few small areas, pricing in the commercial markets has been relatively stable.
Continue reading "Open Source and Dowward Price Pressures" »
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