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In a story titled "Ingres predicts the end of open source", Dave Dargo is being interviewed, and his views are expressed as if the end of the open source is coming fairly soon. Where as its already argued a several times that a new model of open source is into penetration. Companies today are realizing that keeping the source code closed is not going to fetch them a lot of flexibility, and moreover the new regulations and mandatory implementations make life tougher for any application management and support department if the vendor for that application is not cooperating with the modification of source code (which rarely is the case as we know it!).

Now, with the flexibility and freedom given to the client with an option of open source code, its upto the client whether they feel competent enough to do the modiication or customization themselves or would be willing to engage the vendor itself for a small fee to make those changes/modifications. But with the bottomline that the flexibility is there and its going to pay the client a long ways.

In this article, Dargo continues to lay out the pretty picture of tomorrow, the beautiful licensing scheme of open source and the very convinient way of updating and the flexibilities it'll come with. Surely, we can't expect everything to happen so smooth. There will be bottlenecks, closed door discussions, and more importantly some serious issues on what to do if you are still stuck with closed source!

May be its time now for introspection, not only from the development companies but also from the companies who are going to be the users tomorrow or currently are of such open source/closed source technology . Its not an easy walk for anyone, and we all are learning from our mistakes, everyday, and will continue to do so.

Technorati Tags: open-source, ingres, source+code, licensing, ca, regulations, deployments, dave+dargo

In a recent development IBM & Novell have joined hands together towards contributing code to an open source initiative to build a user centric, online identity management system. Quite similarly Eclipse IDE has been long supported by the consortium of big corporations (including IBM). Now it may sound quite repetitive to read IBM's name again and again but its slowly but not so quitely making its way into the open source world. In a recent buyout of some open source milestone companies by Oracle, it appears Oracle is also headed open source way. But for the so called bought out open source start-up/established companies their future is now at the mercy of these big corporations. And it appears that for those open source companies it would never be the same again.

Looks like there is a lot of ground which these bought out open source companies have to lose. Company ethics and objectives will be mixed-up, lots of compromising and the challenge of facing threat to merge with the new culture. It might be a tough road ahead for these acquired companies.

For whatever reasons, the future still holds good for the big corporations, and sometimes we see 'google' or 'yahoo' in the making, but not quite often. Infact, we haven't seen any in quite a while now.

Technorati Tags: open-source, eclipse, identity+management, initiatives, Oracle, IBM

It lurked me today while getting into the unknown dimensions with which some applications architecture is deepened so deep. As I was surfing around the tools which are there on the open source world I found plenty which are duplicate efforts or efforts with minor changes to the one which are already out there. Now, this could be very much true for various other suite of applications. And its true that there is no control over the open source community on what you can or should build and what you cannot or shouldn't! At SourceForge the possibilities are endless. And it should be because we are talking about the open source world. Its a free community of developers and by far the best. But the point here is should this community be controlled in terms of wasting the re-development of those products which are already out there?

Its a very debatable question. And it seems quite annoying argument to me personally. But if I look beyond the realm it might give a way into more innovative practices of the open source development community rather than limiting their innovation itself. I'm looking here only at the positive side folks. The negatives could be pondered on once we know what's the benefit already.

Quite surprisingly its not a reality check now or something new which development community has never noticed before. But whenever we come across something like the scenario mentioned here above we simply pass on or just ignore that it exists. I for one wasn't sure whether I should discuss this in length or breadth. But surely this a topic which could be brought up if not in the immediate future then in the future sometime.

I also suspect that with these buy outs of open source companies we might see a new standard evolving. Or for that matter a control of quality in producing those open source applications. Now I wouldn't correlate this with the assumption that there would be a mass production of the applications or for that matter the effects of enterprise software would be seen in the open source world as well but surely things are going to change in the open source world with in the next couple of years. And we just have to wait and see what those changes would be or if we get lucky then we could probably get an opportunity to contribute to those changes.

In the financial world of bulls and bears, we are encompassing a similar stream of cases with the information technology world. Big players eating and gulping the smaller players and wiping out the stream of innovation and creativity. This phenomenon not uncommon and its been happening for centuries in the form of different events not necessarily buyouts. But what's the fate of these companies, what's going to get at the end of the day when all these major players buy out those tiny innovative engines and kill that creativity for their own profits and benefits. I for self don't know. May be there's a way out of all of this. But for now there doesn't see to be any. In a recent story published by Business Week it speculates that Oracle is preparing to buy JBOSS, ZEND and Sleepycat Software. The whole IT community to Larry Ellison is like Costco Wholesale. He's buying in bulk - hopefully he's getting better discounts and good deals on those buyouts. What's next Oracle?© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Powered by Dextrus Prosoft, Inc.

The year 2005 was surely of Open Source. Past couple of years of hard work and dedication towards creating something new and challenging has been paying off for the open source developers and the community at large. The collaborative efforts of various teams crossing the borders and boundaries have surely gotten a way with the code they developed and development of systems which are now finding deep roots in an enterprise world.

Today corporate world is focused on acquiring and implementing open source tools and softwares, be it database, application servers, back-end infrastructure software or tools. And in this year 2005 the open source industry has seen some rising numbers of corporate customers confirming this trend.

The way to go today is open source. New business models are taking shapes around open source, and as a metaphor if you have an open source model for a new venture and you go and visit Sand Hill Road, the venture firms will throw so much money at you that you could get bruised! Not likely, but its a thought. Despite all this, the dual licensing process has kicked in fast and is spreading than ever before. New business models based on free for open source usage and charged license fee for a commercial product or free basic software and charge for higher end-version or service is now gaining ground. Venture funding is kicking in for SoA based companies. And in recent move by big corporations, Sun Microsystems was the clear winner, who made its flagship and ailing product 'Solaris' open source. Sun expects to have more demand for its services and servers as it goes open source. Also, later in the year Sun made the the entire gamut of its Java product line open source and also made it available free of charge.

Bottom-line to all this is to have a deeper penetration for a company's products and services in the market, and gain a better market share in doing so. And given this scenario, we should be ready to accept that big companies such as Oracle, IBM, Sun, BEA, Google, and Yahoo would not be far behind in acquiring small and valuable companies who develop state-of-the-art open source products either complementing their technology or making them better.

Licensing is another big issue in the open source world. What's there for free and what's not still confuses a lot of people and most of all companies who actually want to use and implement these open source products. And with so many licenses floating around this is bound to happen. Until the industry finds a solutions to all this by standardizing the licensing process and come with a manifesto for the benefit of the open source community. This might be a good opportunity for the open-source software legal experts. A better understanding on open source licenses is a dire need today from the corporate customer viewpoint.

I haven't really been active from past couple of months on my blog as most of my energy is going towards my new project Dextrus Prosoft, Inc. And now, with my involvement increasing in open source projects I've finally decided to expand the horizon for my blog and come up with a space which is more info-sourcable (no such word but look at it as 'information' + 'source') than what it already is and hence the birth of Open Source World.

Open Source World would present a platform for Open Source News, Forums, Blogs, Articles, Books, and Jobs to name a few, also I'll invite great minds working in the open source world to be part of this effort by joining the site and provide their valuable contribution on a regular basis. The idea behind Open Source World this is to provide the Open Source community a centralized avenue where the information on its technology and other areas can be easily obtained.

This blog will continue to be available on this site here and the RSS feeds would be available here.

Business Leadership is a very important subject. Through this blog I plan to create a thread of my thoughts about businesses and their leaderships. Not necessarily in the order they are in different industry domains. Through different readings in books, mags, and on-line I intend to capture the gist and present it here.

This is an important subject from academic stand-point as well. Though, biz school adopt a new approach almost every year to tackle this subject but the practical walkthrough of any industrial domain says and talks a lot on itself. Probaly, it would be wise to say that this cannot be taught in text. But rather, be experienced.

On the oher hand, the good thing is, that the busines today have started realizing the importance of it organization's demands and priorities. There are more things to look into than profit and maximization.

More to follow...

Since no one attempted to disprove statement I made in my last post (Management platform, Open source or bust. 09/15/2005) I will assume that every one think that Open Source Management Platform is a brilliant idea (just for the records, I can not claim ownership of this particular idea, but it does not make it any less brilliant). Today I will try to create “shopping list” of other Open Source projects which could be used as a building blocks for such Platform.
But of course, Java
This is not per-say open source project, but none of the less choice of “the language” will play major role in selection of Open Source projects available for consideration. In my mind, there is only one answer to this – Java. Despite relentless attempts by Mr. Gates, enterprise networking landscape is as diverse as ever. And the only way to avoid porting nightmare is to do Java. It might not be 100% “write once, run anywhere”, but for none-GUI applications it is damn close. Last thing to consider in regards to “the language” is what version of Java to use? It is very tempting to go along with Java 5.0 but I think we need to stick with 1.4. Though Java 5.0 provides bunch of new functions/features none of them are “must have” kind and I have a feeling that its proliferation in the “enterprise world” is not that wide yet (just a couple years ago I run into customer who still used 1.1.8)
Built to be customizable
There are at least two level of customization which need to be addressed:
ability to add new functional modules (plugins),
ability to implement new functions by combining basic functions provided by plugins.
Many Open Source (and closed source) applications implement support for plugins in one way or another. I think JBoss does it best. JBossMX is clean room implementation of Sun JMX API. It is available as a part of JBoss server source distribution. One additional benefit of using JBossMX as a “container” is ability to do “cross-plugging”. It should be possible to plug JBoss modules into the Platform and Platform modules into JBoss!
With such a flexible container as a JBossMX it will be a shame to require to do any Java codding to implement “new functions”. Also if we are trying to build Platform which could be “customized” by end user it is not reasonable to expect such an end user to know how to program in Java. What we need is nice scripting language. It should be:
well known ( we do not wont to invent our own and then expect people to learn it)

• reasonably powerful
• easily extendable
• with available Java binding.

Choosing the scripting language is always rather “emotional” affair. Every one has its own favorite. I have my personal favorite too – JavaScript. And to be more exact – Rhino JavaScript engine from Mozilla folks. Let see if it satisfy requirements we set for the scripting language. No one will object that JavaScript is “well known”. What about “reasonably powerful”? To my taste it strike nice balance between been OO language ( you can “simulate” such OO features as class definitions, instance and class members, class inheritance, ... ) and been typeless forgiving scripting language. Rhino provides us with two level of extensibility: Host Objects and direct to Java interface. Between these two it is possible and very easy to add any kind of functionality to it. Some people will say that Java itself is not exactly speed daemon and Rhino (been scripting language implemented in Java) must be even slower. There are two answers to this concern:

• Java is plenty fast if used properly and Rhino in most cases at least as fast – it actually capable of producing Java byte code,
• We are talking about “scripting” language. The glue to assemble new functions from basic functionality provided by plugins. In most cases all “heavy lifting” should be done in plugin code, so actual performance of scripting engine is more or less irrelevant.

Networking
It goes without saying that our Platform will have to be distributed. Many components of it will be spreaded across enterprise network. These components will have to learn about each other existence and they will have to be able to communicate with each other. To make things even more “interesting”, most likely these components will be deployed into many different sub-nets with many network devices (like routers and firewalls) between them. It is almost guarantied that many of them will not have a luxury of “direct communications” to each other.
I might be biased, but as far as I know the only Open Source project which fit the bill is JXTA. It has Java binding, it provides excellent set of “discovery” functions, it provides ways to communicate in “request-response” and “fire-and-forget” manner and it does all these while completely hiding physical network topology. You can have 10 firewalls and 20 routers between two of your JXTA applications and still from programming point of view it will not look any different from them been running on the same sub-net. As an added bonus, JXTA has Java ME binding (for those “itsy bitsy” devices which can not support full Java ) and C++ binding.
Conclusion (of part 1 )
So far our platform looks like JMX container (courtesy of JBossMX project ) with two plugins in it:

• Rhino Java Script Engine ( with collection of Host Objects which provide access to any other plugins loaded into the local or remote JMX container)
• JXTA plugin ( providing platform components discovery and communicate functionality )

Next time we are going to discuss Storage requirements and ways to interface with outside world entities ( like humans, report writers, ... )

When you start to think about Enterprise Management Platform (EMP), few questions pop into the head:

• Do we really need one?
• What is wrong with “legacy” platforms?
• Why no one came up with “new thing” yet?
• Does open source really has an answer?

Do we really need one?

I guess the answer to this question depends on what is it we are talking about when we are saying “Enterprise Management Platform”. If we are talking about piece of software which can “discover” all computers on your network, show them on nice and colorful console and then ping them once in a while to make sure that they still plug-ed in – than the answer is most definitely NO. On the other hand, if we are talking about piece of software which can easily integrate "best of the breed” discovery tool with “best of the breed” reporting tool and than provide you with ability to define what exactly you mean when you are saying that Managed Object XYZ is “in groovy state”, then the answer could be quite different.
Basically Enterprise IT Universe consists of so many different things and needs to be managed from so many different “angles”, that it is impossible to put all needed knowledge into single product. So Enterprise Management Platform should not even try to do any “management” but instead should transform into “Enterprise Management Tools Collaboration Platform”.

What is wrong with “legacy” platforms?

But wait, “That Nice and Great” platform has endless list of options. Surely they can cooperate with any “best of breed” tool you care to throw into it. And “Highly Popular Old Working” platform can do web services. Should not it be enough? What about “Best Mechanical Calculator” platform? It was built around “script everything" concept. If you want to deal with “groovy state” or XYZ object, all you need is to write another script.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. None of the “legacy” platforms were built with much emphasis on “Ease of Tool Collaboration”. There were no reasons for it back then. Companies which developed these platforms truly believed that they can “boil the ocean” and “cure common cold” of Enterprise Management all by themselves (maybe with few acquisitions). Best of them, did have some sort of APIs to let 3rd parties to do some relatively minor additions which were too “small of a fish” to go after. None of them were too eager to let customers define what he/she wants to manage and how. They had very good reason not to make this kind of customization too simple. All of these companies have huge Customers Support teams and they make as much money (and sometimes even more) by “adapting” their software to customer real needs as they make by selling it. If you add to all this the fact that most of the code in these “legacy” platforms was written 5 or even 10 years ago, it will become increasingly clear that “legacy” platforms is a wrong place to look for “The Answer”.

Why no one came up with “new thing” yet?

The answer is very simple – money. Big companies which can afford R&D expenses associated with development of a new shiny platform, do not have any incentive to do it. They are mildly interested in making their own platforms a little bit more robust/reliable/scalable, but they have all that “compatibility skeletons in the closet” to deal with so they can not do anything drastic. At the same time, they have no interest at all in making platform easily adaptable to customer needs (what all these folks from Customer Support will do?). Small innovative companies just can not cope with this kind of problems. Let's face it, there is no money in the plumbing. No one in their right mind will spend millions of dollars to develop something they can not sell.

Does open source really has an answer?

I guess you will never know for sure until you try. But Open Source have some unique features which can make this kind of project a possibility. We can start with most obvious things, like bunch of highly skilled developers which could join such project for all the different reasons people do join Open Source Projects. Then we can talk about almost endless plethora of existing Open Source Projects which could provide building blocks for such project. It could be anything from something huge like JXTA to something small like Apache Commons. Open Source at the moment reached the “critical mass” when you can build almost anything just by combining existing pieces. The last thing in favor of Open Source is the fact that such project will be vendor neutral. Hopefully other companies will not consider it as a threat. Maybe they even will support it (it did become cool lately to support Open Source Projects).

This article published at WIRED definitely brings out a good question. Are we spaced out? Also, it brings out where the new information age may lie. Development of applications and their IT innovation is not limited but still a whole new scope lies beyond the realm of the usual IT world. The exciting and new challenges might be seen there. May be in next 30 years or so we have a new platoon of IT outsourcers specializing off-planet-shoring!! You never know. Nevertheless its interesting to read whats surrounding us. Thanks to WIRED!

Check the article here or click above.