Bye, Bye Borland

After the sale of its development tools division to Embarcadero in 2008, Borland kept only the tools dealing with requirements management and software testing. This didn’t improve its financial situation and finally Borland sold itself to MicroFocus. This was a sad end for a brand that accompanied software developer for more than 25 years. Software requirements have always been a secondary topic in the software development tools world and the trend towards agility hasn’t improved this. Now you can manage user stories with paper cards and a board. Approaches like UML are declining and you will find few items dealing with them in today’s programmers waterhole like dzone.com or stackoverflow.com, The end of Borland is just the symptom that this world is difficult for requirements tools vendors.

Oracle Buys Sun, WMware Buys Spring and You Buy Software

With a little bit of irony, just one year after having bought MySQL, Sun was acquired by Oracle. It is difficult to judge a deal that is not completed yet as the European Commission is still examining the merger. I am however afraid that the business and financial objectives of Oracle will largely lead to the reduction or the end of most of the Sun open source efforts and a serious slowdown in MySQL evolution.

Just after the future of Java becomes a topic of discussion after the deal between Oracle and Sun, WMware decided to acquire SpringSource and to give to this entity a stronger platform to promote the Java language. Since then, SpringSource has launched its Tomcat server version, Enterprise Java Cloud and Spring Roo. Previously it had acquired G2One at the end of 2008 and thus the control of the Groovy and Grails products. It is now surely the most important active player for Java software development tools.

Google is (also) a Software Development Tools Company

Google domination in the search engine world is well known, but as far as developers are concerned, it is amazing how Google is quietly occupying more and more space. Here are some of the software development initiatives of Google:
* Google App Engine
* Google Web Toolkit GWT
* Go Language
* Google open source projects forge
* Google I/O Conference

Google seems to have understood that besides the content, it should also be active in the plumbing that runs the Web. This is why software developers should be interested in what Google does in this area. You could do this following some blogs like the Google Code Blog and the Google Testing Blog. You will see that besides the well-known projects, Google releases a lot of interesting open source tools created by its development team.

Sun Press release said “There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris.” I think that this last sentence will reflect the main point of this purchase, as far as software developers are concerned. In his quest for getting a more important share of the software infrastructure of companies, Oracle acquires mainly a programming expertise and operating system that should complement its application and databases solutions. The hardware part should also allow Oracle to offer a complete optimized hardware and software solution to its customers, even if, due to Sun smaller market share, Oracle has to be friendly with its other hardware partners like HP or Dell. Acquiring Sun, Oracle also increase its expertise in the Java middleware area, after the acquisition last year of BEA Systems.

The other fact which is contained in Sun press release sentence, or I should say which is omitted, is MySQL. Sun acquired MySQL in January 2008, as a way to boost its software offer. MySQL has been for a long time an important issue for Oracle, as it was a big competitor in the lower end of the market for databases. With this acquisition, Oracle has the possibility of “quietly” killing the MySQL development process and offer the current MySQL paying customer an opportunity to migrate towards its own database product. I don’t see Oracle maintaining two database product lines, especially if one is mainly “given away” for free. Even if existing Oracle customers may not be tempted by MySQL, this new database was always in consideration for startups. There were also some companies that tried to build upon MySQL the missing tools to bring it close to the power of Oracle products.

We expect a similar fate, silent slow death through lower financial support, for mainly of the other Sun’s technologies: NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX or OpenOffice. Oracle always want to get the most of the financial aspect of acquisitions and spending money on open source projects and technology that has low immediate return on investment is not something that it would consider, unless it could be used as a tactical weapon against some of its competitors, like Microsoft or SAP for instance.

Sun Press Release
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

Source: Methods & Tools

We can see that the results have not changed significantly compared to the previous polls. Even if the number of participants thinking that quality is similar has decreased slightly, a majority still judges that open source software development tools is as good or better than commercial products.

Open source is now mostly an industrial activity

The difficulty to answer can be explained by the increase of the diversity of management type for open source projects. We have seen a noticeable growth of the industrialization of major projects. This has been realized by different means: acquisition of open source companies (MySQL by Sun), industrially backed foundations (Eclipse, Apache) or funding by venture capital (SpringSource, Zend). Commercial involvement has also been noticeable in providing support to open source with hosted communities or forges (codeplex.com, code.google.com). Initiatives like the Google summer of code (code.google.com/soc/) provide also new resources to open source projects.

Money is certainly not a guarantee for higher quality, but it allows open source projects to have better development conditions. They can also do more promotion that normally increase their user base and therefore the available feedback that should feed product improvement. We are also at a time where the “natural selection” process has reduced the number of active projects in mature areas. Looking at the projects hosted by sourceforge.net or tigris.org, you can see that many tools have not evolved recently. I don’t see a lot of new initiatives to build open source web servers or databases. In other areas, like testing, new projects are more trying to build on existing solutions or porting them to a new language.

Second generation open source projects

Some open source sectors, like the web user interface, are however still trying to reach the same maturity level than IDE or databases. Many benefit from the experience of the first-generation projects. Companies to exploit the commercial side of open source are created from the start of the project. They attract venture capital and are managed by experienced open source executives, like Appcelerator that attracted a lot of former JBoss core team members. This trend in turn influences commercial players, as it can be seen with the initiative from Adobe to put its Flex code in the open source domain with the release of Flex 3. The initial assumption that open source software was created by a group of individuals working on their spare time outside a commercial structure is now less and less true today, especially for the main tools used by developers.

It is different for Microsoft

A qualitative study that we conducted on LinkedIn shows that there is a difference between the Microsoft universe and other software development contexts. People using Visual Studio seem to see more open source products quality as inferior. It is true that if Eclipse or NetBeans have targetted Java or PHP, they have not tried to deal directly with the .NET technology. This is also true because Microsoft has a strong control on the software development infrastructure (operating system, database) of its customers. Thus it is not possible to achieve a LAMP-type solution in this context. In addition, Microsoft tries to protect its market and can attack open source projects when it thinks that they violate its intellectual property rights, like it did for testdriven.net.

Some references on the quality of open source software:

Previous Methods & Tools poll analysis

Coverity resources on open source quality

SQO-OSS: Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software

High Quality and Open Source Software Practices

Software Quality Assessment of Open Source Software

Open Development: From Transparency to Quality

MySQL was forecasted to set an IPO this year, but it seems that with the difficult conditions of the stock market its initial investors have chosen the easy solution to cash their money by letting Sun acquire the company.

For Sun, who recently changed its NASDAQ stock ticker from SUN to JAVA, it is a confirmation that the new strategic direction is in software and services. This move is therefore an important step to transform itself more in a service oriented company. With MySQL, Sun acquires a fast-growing company that has already a dual open source-commercial approach. Its estimated 2007 revenues were around $70 million. It is also a quick and good ticket to enter the database market already occupied by its competitors (Microsoft, Oracle and IBM). We suppose that Sun will not touch a lot to the existing MySQL organization. Being backed by a bigger company will bring an increased credibility and a better sales channel. Sun could also provide additional resources to improve its product so that it will become a more fierce competitor against Oracle.

The acquisition could also help Sun to propose its own alternative to the open source Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) architecture. As it put its Solaris operating system in open source last year, it could propose a Solaris/Apache/MySQL/Java (SAMJ) pack that could be optimized. This could be a real alternative to the Windows ecosystem that is backed by a “old” company, thus allowing medium-size companies to have the impression to make a safer transition than with a pack of dispersed open source projects.

This move also changes the landscape for the other companies operating in the open source database area, like PostgreSQL and Ingres. However it is also a financial validation of the open source commercial model and some companies could end being the target of a bigger fish in the future. I will not be surprised if companies like Red Hat, HP… or Yahoo! will make some acquisitions in the sector in a near future.