Red Hat-JBoss, Great For Open Source ... But IBM?
In the narrow-minded, over-analyzing of the IT world, you will get mixed reviewed on the Red Hat acquisition of JBoss. In reality, there are at least 2 perspectives.
Great For Open Source!
Absolutely no significant commercial entity even loosely associated with Linux has the history Red Hat does. Everything they do they release as GPL to a fault, with rare exceptions. This even includes allowing their competitors to use and ship the same software, as Novell will continue to do in the case of JBoss.
Sun Microsystems comes closest in GPL donations, StarDivision's StarOffice (now OpenOffice.org aka OOo) and its upkeep (Sun employs half of the OOo core team) being $250M bulk of that contribution. IBM and many use Linux for little more than a product avenue, with extremely limited GPL donations (largely kernel), and sub-$50M donations in open source. E.g., IBM's $1B investment in Linux has been almost entirely non-open source, and even the more recent $100M investment in Notes on Linux is completely proprietary.
Oracle should be considered the Microsoft of the Linux world. In fact, their talk about possibly acquiring Novell does scare me a bit -- especially as Novell has turned SuSE into far more of a pro-GPL, community-focused project than it ever was prior to the acquition.
Even the Apache-Geronimo team should be excited. There's now more code to share with the team under Red Hat's typical approach to copyright and licensing that was not possible as JBoss.
Not the First Time Red Hat Changed Direction
Many are questioning why Red Hat would buy JBoss, when they had already supported Jonas. Red Hat has always wanted to move into the web application space, but didn't know how to proceed. As is typical with Red Hat, they pay a lot of key developer salaries and put them on core open source projects, in the hope they further the projects along. After a year or two, they then start building Rawhide (aka Fedora Development) packages and eventually they make it into their distributions.
Jonas was that direction, until now. The question is why? Well, we'll revisit that in a second.
In 2003, Red Hat announced it was going to build an open source network authentication and directory services stack. This was largely to compete with Novell's eDirectory moves as it released Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), largely a set of services for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and laid down its plans for a Linux native Netware 7. The core included supporting improvming Kerberos and OpenLDAP developments to add necessary features. Prior to it's Novell acquisition, OpenLDAP was already integrated into SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
By fall of 2004, Red Hat completely changed direction. It was already reselling Netscape [Certificate and] Directory Server, the staple LDAP server for enterprises since the late '90s. Sun One uses Netscape Directory Server (NsDS) as its LDAP server, and it includes sychronization support for many other LDAP systems, including Microsoft ActiveDirectory Server (ADS). Despite their work on OpenLDAP, Red Hat bought NsDS (including the Certificate Server) outright, because it was much farther along than OpenLDAP in many areas. As of April 2005, Red Hat secured the rights from AOL to make it GPL open source (sans a few items).
Since then, Red Hat has been able to work on more useful capabilities in Fedora Directory Server (fka Netscape Directory Server), which will (continue) to be commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server (the original rebranding). E.g., one of the nicest additions was the release of a mod_nss module for authentication and complete Apache-Mozilla X.509/PKCS integration -- something severely lacking in the Apache-OpenLDAP space. Things like multi-master replication and ADS synchronization were already part of FDS, saving on the cost of adding them to OpenLDAP.
At the same time, the OpenLDAP team is free to integrate any and all FDS developments, while gaining some "for free."
But Is It Smart For Business?
But Red Hat is still a business, and that has mean wondering why and if they made the right decision for 2 reasons:
1. The timing and costs
2. The possible market fall-out
Unlike the $20M-something "chump change" Red Hat paid for NsDS, JBoss was a bit more costly at $330-420M. In fact, it now goes down as the largest acquition by and for open source beyond Sun's purchase and LGPL'ing of StarDivision and its StarOffice suite (rumored to be around $250M). Why would Red Hat plunk down that much money instead of continuing to develop Jonas?
Was it time-to-market? Would the time it would take to take Jonas to the fore-front be too costly in lost sales? Would that make up for the time-to-market cost, which would be reduced? Or did Red Hat see Jonas not gaining on JBoss and finally decided it was best to acquire them and GPL their codebase?
Or was it because of possible Oracle's interest? I mean, if Red Hat is the GPL flagship, Oracle is most definitely the Microsoft-tactic flagship in the Linux world. If Oracle acquired JBoss, would it not mean that they'd have a strangle-hold over a lot of Linux -- let alone freeze out Red Hat's desire to enter the application space. As much as I love Red Hat's GPL dedication and focus on the community, sometimes they have a lot to learn about VARs and vendor relationships.
Which brings me to the market fall-out to consider.
IBM makes a lot of money off of Red Hat in serivces, especially in the web application space where it sells both licenses of Web Sphere and consulting services. Now Red Hat wants to get into this space, at least in product and integration. That hits IBM in the pocket-book, at least on Web Sphere licenses, even if IBM is still involves in the services. Although Red Hat knows how to approach Linux from the GPL aspect, again, it has shown it does not understand the VAR space. How do they convey to IBM they are not a threat?
It's really not a question of what Red Hat does, but what IBM will ...
If IBM Fears Lost Sales, Red Hat Is Toast
Caldera died 20 days after purchasing SCO. Caldera wanted a split UNIX-Linux model, one with a high-end 64-bit UNIX to off-set its developing, commodity Linux product sales. That directly hurt IBM's AIX/Power sales and its split UNIX-Linux model. So 20 days after their purchase of SCO, IBM undercut them by withdrawing from Project Moneterey with SCO and withholding all source code -- rendering SCO's, now Caldera's, 64-bit UNIX future entirely null and void. IBM didn't need to do this to survive, it would have only cost them a few hundred million dollars in sales -- maybe not even 1% overall. But that's all it took, which rendered SCO a "dead weight" in Caldera's acquisition.
Now Caldera tried to get Linux profitable over 30 months and failed, whereas just a few high-end SCO UNIX 64-bit sales for Itanium would have gave them the cash influx they needed. The rest is now another story, SCO v. IBM. Ironically, IBM hurt competition in the Linux world, yet SCO got stuck with the check because 90% of the Linux community doesn't know how contract law works. Let alone 90% of the Linux community can't tell the difference between a "Non-Compete" clause in a contract and "IP Infringement," which SCO an avenue to expand the lawsuit when IBM didn't settle (like SCO had originally hoped). Now we just have rhetoric atop of rhetoric. All while SCO's case on Project Monetery -- items #50-55 in the original March 2003 filing -- still has merit and SCO is likely to win on some counts against IBM in its planned Utah jury case.
In any case, a very good and pro-GPL Linux company is now dead. All because of not any greediness of SCO (who just needed cash to make it through litigation in May -- an rhetoric avenue created by 90% of the Linux community who didn't realize was little more than a contract dispute in the original March filing), but the original greediness of IBM. IBM, a very large company with the lawyers and liquid capital to starve off smaller companies while they cross them in contracts. A company people blindly assume is "good for Linux" because they have spent $1.1B on maturing their product line, with far, far less actually put into open source -- and almost nothing in GPL donations. Far less than even Caldera-SCO!
But just like the old "Quiz Shows," people don't tune in for the truth, they only tune in for the money.
So far, I haven't seen any reaction out of IBM on the Red Hat-JBoss anouncement. Then again, IBM was pretty silent those first 20 days after Caldera bought SCO. If IBM feels Red Hat is a threat to their bottom line, which this may very well be, you might be reading some seemingly insignificant news about IBM's arrangement iwth Red Hat in the next month. After all, most people thought IBM breaking the Project Moneterey contract with Caldera-SCO wasn't signficant either.
I mean, it was only everything to the future of Caldera.
At $350-420M, JBoss is very much everything to Red Hat, a major investment and strategic move.
So the question becomes, how much do IBM's contracts with Red Hat affect its bottom line? Can IBM use them to adversely affect and/or control Red Hat, or just undercut them completely? I mean, I don't see how IBM couldn't see this as a threat. Will we be scorning Red Hat in 3 years? Will people talk about Red Hat "going bad" and blaming it on everything, and not IBM, like they did SCO?
I hope not. I really hope not. I really don't want to see this again.
Great For Open Source!
Absolutely no significant commercial entity even loosely associated with Linux has the history Red Hat does. Everything they do they release as GPL to a fault, with rare exceptions. This even includes allowing their competitors to use and ship the same software, as Novell will continue to do in the case of JBoss.
Sun Microsystems comes closest in GPL donations, StarDivision's StarOffice (now OpenOffice.org aka OOo) and its upkeep (Sun employs half of the OOo core team) being $250M bulk of that contribution. IBM and many use Linux for little more than a product avenue, with extremely limited GPL donations (largely kernel), and sub-$50M donations in open source. E.g., IBM's $1B investment in Linux has been almost entirely non-open source, and even the more recent $100M investment in Notes on Linux is completely proprietary.
Oracle should be considered the Microsoft of the Linux world. In fact, their talk about possibly acquiring Novell does scare me a bit -- especially as Novell has turned SuSE into far more of a pro-GPL, community-focused project than it ever was prior to the acquition.
Even the Apache-Geronimo team should be excited. There's now more code to share with the team under Red Hat's typical approach to copyright and licensing that was not possible as JBoss.
Not the First Time Red Hat Changed Direction
Many are questioning why Red Hat would buy JBoss, when they had already supported Jonas. Red Hat has always wanted to move into the web application space, but didn't know how to proceed. As is typical with Red Hat, they pay a lot of key developer salaries and put them on core open source projects, in the hope they further the projects along. After a year or two, they then start building Rawhide (aka Fedora Development) packages and eventually they make it into their distributions.
Jonas was that direction, until now. The question is why? Well, we'll revisit that in a second.
In 2003, Red Hat announced it was going to build an open source network authentication and directory services stack. This was largely to compete with Novell's eDirectory moves as it released Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), largely a set of services for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and laid down its plans for a Linux native Netware 7. The core included supporting improvming Kerberos and OpenLDAP developments to add necessary features. Prior to it's Novell acquisition, OpenLDAP was already integrated into SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
By fall of 2004, Red Hat completely changed direction. It was already reselling Netscape [Certificate and] Directory Server, the staple LDAP server for enterprises since the late '90s. Sun One uses Netscape Directory Server (NsDS) as its LDAP server, and it includes sychronization support for many other LDAP systems, including Microsoft ActiveDirectory Server (ADS). Despite their work on OpenLDAP, Red Hat bought NsDS (including the Certificate Server) outright, because it was much farther along than OpenLDAP in many areas. As of April 2005, Red Hat secured the rights from AOL to make it GPL open source (sans a few items).
Since then, Red Hat has been able to work on more useful capabilities in Fedora Directory Server (fka Netscape Directory Server), which will (continue) to be commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server (the original rebranding). E.g., one of the nicest additions was the release of a mod_nss module for authentication and complete Apache-Mozilla X.509/PKCS integration -- something severely lacking in the Apache-OpenLDAP space. Things like multi-master replication and ADS synchronization were already part of FDS, saving on the cost of adding them to OpenLDAP.
At the same time, the OpenLDAP team is free to integrate any and all FDS developments, while gaining some "for free."
But Is It Smart For Business?
But Red Hat is still a business, and that has mean wondering why and if they made the right decision for 2 reasons:
1. The timing and costs
2. The possible market fall-out
Unlike the $20M-something "chump change" Red Hat paid for NsDS, JBoss was a bit more costly at $330-420M. In fact, it now goes down as the largest acquition by and for open source beyond Sun's purchase and LGPL'ing of StarDivision and its StarOffice suite (rumored to be around $250M). Why would Red Hat plunk down that much money instead of continuing to develop Jonas?
Was it time-to-market? Would the time it would take to take Jonas to the fore-front be too costly in lost sales? Would that make up for the time-to-market cost, which would be reduced? Or did Red Hat see Jonas not gaining on JBoss and finally decided it was best to acquire them and GPL their codebase?
Or was it because of possible Oracle's interest? I mean, if Red Hat is the GPL flagship, Oracle is most definitely the Microsoft-tactic flagship in the Linux world. If Oracle acquired JBoss, would it not mean that they'd have a strangle-hold over a lot of Linux -- let alone freeze out Red Hat's desire to enter the application space. As much as I love Red Hat's GPL dedication and focus on the community, sometimes they have a lot to learn about VARs and vendor relationships.
Which brings me to the market fall-out to consider.
IBM makes a lot of money off of Red Hat in serivces, especially in the web application space where it sells both licenses of Web Sphere and consulting services. Now Red Hat wants to get into this space, at least in product and integration. That hits IBM in the pocket-book, at least on Web Sphere licenses, even if IBM is still involves in the services. Although Red Hat knows how to approach Linux from the GPL aspect, again, it has shown it does not understand the VAR space. How do they convey to IBM they are not a threat?
It's really not a question of what Red Hat does, but what IBM will ...
If IBM Fears Lost Sales, Red Hat Is Toast
Caldera died 20 days after purchasing SCO. Caldera wanted a split UNIX-Linux model, one with a high-end 64-bit UNIX to off-set its developing, commodity Linux product sales. That directly hurt IBM's AIX/Power sales and its split UNIX-Linux model. So 20 days after their purchase of SCO, IBM undercut them by withdrawing from Project Moneterey with SCO and withholding all source code -- rendering SCO's, now Caldera's, 64-bit UNIX future entirely null and void. IBM didn't need to do this to survive, it would have only cost them a few hundred million dollars in sales -- maybe not even 1% overall. But that's all it took, which rendered SCO a "dead weight" in Caldera's acquisition.
Now Caldera tried to get Linux profitable over 30 months and failed, whereas just a few high-end SCO UNIX 64-bit sales for Itanium would have gave them the cash influx they needed. The rest is now another story, SCO v. IBM. Ironically, IBM hurt competition in the Linux world, yet SCO got stuck with the check because 90% of the Linux community doesn't know how contract law works. Let alone 90% of the Linux community can't tell the difference between a "Non-Compete" clause in a contract and "IP Infringement," which SCO an avenue to expand the lawsuit when IBM didn't settle (like SCO had originally hoped). Now we just have rhetoric atop of rhetoric. All while SCO's case on Project Monetery -- items #50-55 in the original March 2003 filing -- still has merit and SCO is likely to win on some counts against IBM in its planned Utah jury case.
In any case, a very good and pro-GPL Linux company is now dead. All because of not any greediness of SCO (who just needed cash to make it through litigation in May -- an rhetoric avenue created by 90% of the Linux community who didn't realize was little more than a contract dispute in the original March filing), but the original greediness of IBM. IBM, a very large company with the lawyers and liquid capital to starve off smaller companies while they cross them in contracts. A company people blindly assume is "good for Linux" because they have spent $1.1B on maturing their product line, with far, far less actually put into open source -- and almost nothing in GPL donations. Far less than even Caldera-SCO!
But just like the old "Quiz Shows," people don't tune in for the truth, they only tune in for the money.
So far, I haven't seen any reaction out of IBM on the Red Hat-JBoss anouncement. Then again, IBM was pretty silent those first 20 days after Caldera bought SCO. If IBM feels Red Hat is a threat to their bottom line, which this may very well be, you might be reading some seemingly insignificant news about IBM's arrangement iwth Red Hat in the next month. After all, most people thought IBM breaking the Project Moneterey contract with Caldera-SCO wasn't signficant either.
I mean, it was only everything to the future of Caldera.
At $350-420M, JBoss is very much everything to Red Hat, a major investment and strategic move.
So the question becomes, how much do IBM's contracts with Red Hat affect its bottom line? Can IBM use them to adversely affect and/or control Red Hat, or just undercut them completely? I mean, I don't see how IBM couldn't see this as a threat. Will we be scorning Red Hat in 3 years? Will people talk about Red Hat "going bad" and blaming it on everything, and not IBM, like they did SCO?
I hope not. I really hope not. I really don't want to see this again.
5 comments:
Great article. I think IBM identified the potential threat Redhat was becoming when it was the only Linux vendor certified for their hardware. Now I'm seeing more projects where SuSE is being used...
I don't think it would cost IBM that much to start suggesting SuSE to their clients...
I'm seeing this situation like this: Redhat looses a good partnership with IBM because of JBoss. And now RH tries to compete with IBM/Webspheres, BEA/Weblogic, etc.. the big guys.
I don't know.. this doesn't look that good. Perhaps it's just my feeling and I'm totally out of reality (which isn't all that impossible but..).
What are you talking about?
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has not only been certified on many pieces of IBM hardware LONGER than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) -- let alone SLES was FIRST (RHEL came after SLES) -- but SLES on IBM hardware had a HIGHER "Common Criteria" Certification than RHEL for quite awhile (I believe both are level 3 now).
As always, Red Hat buys up stuff and makes 100% of it GPL. That's why Red Hat is a friend to the industry. But I think Red Hat didn't realize that it's now threatening IBM's proprietary business -- and Caldera made that mistake as well. Now sure this was a good move for Red Hat, but any Red Hat acquisition is always a good move for the GPL world.
My bad, I read somewhere that IBM was "now" diversifying their Linux portfolio with Suse (because of RH prices IIRC). I should have researched a bit more that history since I've not been following that IBM partnership in special.
I'm a big RH fan.. and when they bought the Netscape Directory Server I was sure that was going to turn out as a good thing for the community (as it did IMHO). As you've said, that looks like the path they're going to take with JBoss as well.
Sounds like whomever wrote that article doesn't know the first thing about SuSE. SuSE was _first_ with a separate "Enterprise Linux" product. Again, IBM-SuSE had a higher Common Criteria certification than IBM-Red Hat for awhile.
The only thing I can think of that might have caused that author to demonize Red Hat is because Red Hat doesn't have as much experience in the partner channel than Novell does. Red Hat's marketing and partner support has pissed off HP, IBM, Sun and others on many occassions.
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