IBM in talks to buy SUN

Well not two days after I say how their cloud innovations may be too late in coming for SUN... now IBM is in talks to purchase them. How very interesting.

This potential deal is interesting on multiple fronts.

• RISC (Not Risk as in risky but RISC as in Reduced Instruction Set Computer) This potential merger creates a big home for the remaining non-Intel chip guys. While HP does have their own this combination of fanatical Sun worshipers and the IBM "tried and true"ers is a potentially strong combo. Very different audiences and users though with one driven by tech innovation in Sun users and the other in the "never been fired for picking IBM" mentality.
• Java - Not a lot of the press on the topic brought this up. I guess because it is a shared standard and all that rigmarole. The reality though is that Sun still drives Java in a lot of ways. IBM on the other hand has been a big Java pusher on multiple fronts for development tools, open source etc. This could be a big deal. Of course there is always the gotcha side of the new languages such as SCALA coming up in popularity for the many-core problem.
• Open Source - Sun was big big in the .com era and went down when the .com boom went up. Since then they pushed into Open Source fairly successfully and actually have several software products that they are responsible for that have decent success. Grid, MySQL, even Solaris (a religion among some by itself) are big software assets. Of course the hard part is that IBM has their own efforts in these areas.
• People Logistics - If Sun has an office somewhere, so does IBM. The overhead portion of this could be a big savings opportunity. Not geeky though so I will stop there.
• Competition - Some of the press has stated this is a response to Cisco's entry into the data center space for servers. I doubt that but it does narrow down the big data center players. HP, IBM... ... well...

All told I think this could be good for Sun and IBM. If done right. (isn't that always the trick though... if it works everyone is a genius if it doesn't they were doomed from the get-go.) It gives me some hope for these products and companies for the future and in any case it will be fun to watch.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the Ignorance of Crowds


CIO.com recently did an interview with Linus Torvalds and the rules he lays out for quality code development are very good. It goes well with my theory of each development team needing a Benevolent Dictator role.


Some time ago I was forwarded a great article on Innovation as it relates to Open Source. Several of the key observations were saved for the last page. I thought it would have been good to draw some suggested next steps so I thought I took a crack at it and the items below are the result.

The article by itself has a good deal of value. But for complete understanding you probably need to have the previous context (inferred from the article is probably sufficient for basic understanding) of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Wikipedia has a good simple summary of the paper. At it's simplest though it is a paper written by Eric Raymond about how "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This means that it becomes easier to drill to quality because more people with disparate backgrounds means better test coverage and bug finding. (And a lot more but that's not what this post is about.)

My actual observations from the Strategy and Business article: I have historically referred to the needed role to make any product development work, whether Bazaar or Cathedral, as the Benevolent Dictator role. It is someone with the vision and strength of personality to push or pull those around them into a unified functional reality of a product. Without that role you get a lack of direction and vision and problems ensue. We have seen this need prove out over and over with the hardening work that we have done. Those teams that had a Benevolent Dictator that laid down tenets for development, surrounded themselves with a “Wizard Enclave” of smart folks for enforcement and saw it through generally had much better systems. This showed in test coverage, uptime, ability to adapt and change and many other areas.

I am a big fan of Open Source developed products and have been for some time. It has certainly proven to be the case that those that are successful have this Wizard/Leader/Benevolent Dictator that surrounds themselves with the Wizards that get there via meritocracy. From this “Brain” squad comes unification and initial innovation. Ongoing innovation can be pulled from the Chaos of the Crowd but to become real will need to be driven by the Benevolent Dictator.
When it comes to our own efforts, Internal Open Source and Product Development need to be set up with this type of role and if we can’t identify someone to fill this role then we can’t honestly expect to move that product forward.

Friday Link Day

Oracle offers to buy BEA for $6.66 billion. Outside of the immediate 666 references to evil this does have several interesting implications to the software world. It has been no secret that Oracle has been trying to buy RedHat and JBoss and this puts yet another point of pressure in that series of events and the two worlds of Open Source software versus Corporate Sold software.

Airlines agree on check-in by cell phone. The headline alone on this one caught my attention. There are many implications to this possibility. I have long been jealous of the fact that non-US based cell technology is farther ahead and this is yet another item that will drive the laggard gap.

And last links but not least links, here are a few fun links that were shared with me from my JanaRSS feed. Google Smackdown, a query tool to see which phrase or words appears more across the web. Soople - an easy expert search, with a collection of tools in easy format also built on Google tech.

Yay Friday!

When you wrestle a pig you both get dirty but the pig likes it

The next in the significant Open Source events category is one that occurred with Microsoft and Novell. (Yes, that Microsoft). This deal has to do with Linux as well, but in this case its SUSE that is under discussion. Read the announcement or watch the video footage if you want more detail.

The pundits on this one are even more passionate. (As if we would expect anything else with that Microsoft being involved) Linux Journal likens the deal to Racketeering from Microsoft with FUD sowing from Novell/SUSE. Bernard Golden claims the deal just proves that Open Source is important to your future.

According to the Public Relations statements by both companies the deal is all about Virtualization, Web Services Management and Document Format Compatibility. It is also a five year patent protection agreement where Microsoft agrees not to sue users of SUSE if there is any patent infringement in the SUSE system.

My thoughts around this go immediately to other companies that have made a deal with the devil... err... I mean entered into cooperation agreements with Microsoft. (And no I am not an ABM Coalition card holder. I actually have a fascination and respect for Microsoft, .NET in particular and even SQL Server... I just think that from a business perspective you have to realize what you are dealing with) Take for example Sybase.... Somewhere around Sybase version 4.9.2 Sybase and Oracle were the big mean Relational databases competing tooth and nail with one another. Sybase was, at the time, viewed as slightly more technically advanced while Oracle had better marketing. Sybase then entered into a cooperation agreement with Microsoft to build a version of their database product specially tuned for the Microsoft Environment. A great move, they would get information from Microsoft on the particulars of the platform, build a super tuned engine and everyone would benefit... right? They were very successful, the product created is the forefather of the now nearly everywhere Microsoft SQL Server. As far as what Sybase got out of the deal... they got some short term revenue in the first few years of the agreement before it ended and Microsoft took things over. (Honest, they are still in business now) Other deals that can be pointed to include Borland... Symantec... Corel... need I say more?

Not that this will end up being an end of the world. Just like Microsoft owns the productivity suite on Apple they will likely get the information they need to build and own the productivity suite market on Linux. If .NET components run and integrate well with other platforms but work best on Windows platforms... hasn't Microsoft always been very good at Embrace, Extend, Exterminate?

Another one that will be fun to watch.