The Oracle open source credibility gap

Paula says open source executives are suspicious, and the unscientific poll I did here confirms it.

Oracle has an open source crediblity gap.

(Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, right, with David Lander, were part of a radio comedy troupe dubbed The Credibility Gap early in their careers. It must be true, I read it on Wikipedia. They are now touring as Unwigged and Unplugged with Christopher Guest.)

Fact is that many in the open source movement distrust Oracle’s motives in buying Sun and taking over such blue-chip open source names as Java, mySQL, Open Solaris and OpenOffice.org.

The fear that Oracle will seek to destroy these projects is real. And as with the swine flu, fear has consequences.

Just as Mexico is being pummeled because people fear a bug that has (as of yet) killed no one in this country, so Oracle is hurt by its open source credibility gap.

When Oracle bought proprietary vendors like Seibel Systems it could easily make up the $5.8 billion cost on the backs of Seibel’s customers. Their code, and support for their code, disappeared into the Oracle maw and, since most were fairly scaled, they had no choice.

Oracle can’t do that with mySQL. Any attempt to change the license or kill it through non-support would be immediately followed by a community fork, which in turn would probably be followed by entrepreneurs grabbing former mySQL committers and selling support for the fork.

Things would be even tougher with OpenOffice. A good alternative, OpenOffice Symphony, is supported by IBM, which even has a viable business model for the office suite.

Java was proprietary until a few years ago, yet dozens of companies had versions of it. Making it open source was necessary to tear down that Tower of Babel. And Glassfish?

Point is, Oracle is already being hurt by this community distrust. Where CEO Larry Ellison can feel it, in the wallet.

So long as Oracle does not make its intentions clear, and so long as fear exists that it intends to do Sun’s open source projects harm, support for those projects is going to diminish. The assets are like ripening fruit.

Until Oracle makes clear that it intends to fully support Sun’s open source projects, and by extension the open source movement itself, the value of those assets will be degraded.

Author: Dana Blankenhorn @ http://blogs.zdnet.com

Read more ...

Naked CIO: Oracle and Sun - good luck

Integrating IT can make or break a merger or acquisition, says the Naked CIO. Here's how to get it right.

Inspired by Oracle's recent bid to purchase Sun and mumblings about the difficulty to integrate their product sets, I recalled the challenges IT had in several companies I worked for when trying to integrate systems as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

Firstly, I recall the frustration I had as an executive running IT that I was not included in the 'need to know' circle when the consideration of the merger or acquisition was being discussed. Inevitably, once the deal was pretty much final, IT would be brought into the loop and then be perceived as party poopers when rightly we would identify considerable challenges and costs to integrating services, applications and data into one seamless environment.

In my experience streamlining and creating synergies between platforms and applications of two companies can take a considerable amount of time, often years, to do right.

When the board looks at the upside of a merger or acquisition, they almost always leap to the conclusion that services, products, applications and information will be seamlessly integrated from day one. Even those that have been through the exercise before are often still believers that Santa Claus will come down and make everything work perfectly.

Secondly, the challenge when integrating two companies' IT platforms and indeed strategies is attaining business alignment. It is almost always the case of a square peg in a round whole - and trying to understand what to compromise is very difficult.

Additionally, it's hard to decide, with two often-divergent strategies coming together, which one or which hybrid is the right one. Don't ask the board, as in my experience they rarely have thought that far ahead.

So in most cases integrating IT platforms in these circumstances is a wait-and-see exercise propagated by naïve executives and pawned off on unsuspecting IT professionals to make right - and to be accountable for if it goes wrong.

There are many ways in which companies can mitigate some of these unfortunate events. Having a CIO or IT executive on the board in the first place is an excellent start. Evaluating the IT integration opportunities even before due diligence would be beneficial. Understanding these costs and challenges prior to any agreement is a must especially if IT integration is a key aspect of the success of the whole initiative, which is predominantly the case.

When acquiring another organisation, it is critical to have a plan that encompasses all aspects of the integration process right from the beginning. This will allow you to ensure that benchmarks and expectations are managed properly. Quite often you can achieve some form of synergy quickly through establishing a data warehouse that can take multiple source system data and allow for analysis and manipulation while you wait for application synergies and development in order for operation platforms to work in unison.

Even though you, the IT executive, may be the bad-news bearer, never over promise in terms of mergers and acquisitions. Instead always err on the side caution. Why? Because the unknowns in these circumstances always have a negative impact on the plan.

Most of all, convince your company that if it is planning to acquire another company, IT needs to be a key player from the start. This will help with the integration efforts and provide valuable information on the true cost of a merger.

Author: Naked CIO @ http://management.silicon.com

Read more ...

Will OpenOffice survive the Oracle-Sun takeover?

The last week has seen a lot of speculation about the future of Sun’s open source projects now that the company has been absorbed by Oracle. Most of the fallout from Oracle’s latest acquisition falls outside my realm of expertise or even interest. Some of my university readers are certainly going to be curious (OK, some university IT folks and even the occasional K-12 shop that has invested in Sun technologies are downright nervous). However, I have to say that the only bit of Sun technology that I actually care about at this point is OpenOffice.

Sure, Solaris was becoming quite a platform for virtualization and Sun had made real strides in terms of bring cross-platform virtualized applications to the desktop. They donated time, money, and expertise to a variety of educational pursuits. We all know the open source projects they had in their stable. I just can’t get fussed about anything, though, except OpenOffice.

Mostly this is because I’m convinced that MySQL will live on; it’s simply embedded in too many places to die and has already been forked, so I’m not overly concerned. VirtualBox is great, but there are other virtualization products that will do the trick if it dies. OpenOffice has forked as well, but Go-oo.org lacks the brand recognition or credibility of OpenOffice. It is also Windows and Linux only; Macs need to rely on OpenOffice or NeoOffice, the former of which is fully cross-platform.

Why do I care about OpenOffice so much? Because it saves our schools a lot of money. More importantly, it saves our students, parents, and community members a lot of money. It means that any student with a computer can have a fully-functional, mature office productivity suite without paying hundreds of dollars or settling for the Works suite that might have come with their computers.

Can OpenOffice do a mail merge as well as Office 2007? No, not quite. Are its spreadsheet functions as easy to use? Close…very close. Aside from that, though, is there anything that most students, faculty, or staff would be looking for in an Office suite that can’t be satisfied for free with OpenOffice? The simple answer is no.

What this means is that OpenOffice must live on beyond Sun. Maybe Oracle will get behind it; I’m not so sure and I’m not alone. However, whatever rebranding of Go-oo needs to happen should happen and we should make sure that our students and schools still have access to the highest quality, free office suite available.

Author: Christopher Dawson @ http://education.zdnet.com

Read more ...