Sun in Oracle's Orbit - It Could Have Been Worse

So Oracle has bought Sun.

I read the news with some misgivings. Am I sorrier to hear this news than I was to hear about the earlier rumour of IBM's takeover? It's hard to say.

I would have been happiest if Sun had continued on its own long enough to set Java free (both as a completely defined spec (Java 7) and as a completely free (i.e., GPL-ed) implementation). After that, I really wouldn't have cared what happened to Sun.

Unfortunately, the takeover of Sun before the emancipation of Java doesn't give me a good feeling.

A chill goes through me whenever I think of Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. "Solutions" from these three vendors rarely benefit the customer as much as they benefit Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Java from IBM? Java from Oracle? Visualise great big dollar signs in your sales rep's eyes. Java is unlikely to be free (as in speech or beer) with either of these rapacious corporations controlling its destiny.

Still, I think the world has escaped with the lesser of two bleak futures. Sun in Oracle's clutches is probably better for all of us than Sun in IBM's.

In software, there are now three powerhouses (Microsoft, IBM and Oracle/Sun) instead of two (Microsoft and IBM/Sun).

In hardware, there are now three powerhouses (IBM, HP and Oracle/Sun) instead of two (IBM/Sun and HP).

As a devotee of a competitive market, I think things could have been worse than what has come to pass, and so I'm relatively grateful.

The takeover of Sun (by either party) is good news for Linux. Oracle was never an OS company, and they have been the corporate world's strongest Linux backers. IBM does support Linux, but only up to the point where it believes AIX should rule. Solaris would have lost out under IBM. I cannot imagine IBM tolerating the threat to AIX. Oracle will probably be opportunistic about both Linux and Solaris, although it will have no particular religion towards Solaris. The market will push Oracle to favour Linux over Solaris in a way that Sun would have been reluctant to do. So I think Solaris is the big loser in the bargain. But it's no real loss. The best parts of Solaris, like ZFS, have already been cannibalised and are used with Linux, so nothing of value has disappeared.

I think the Oracle takeover is paradoxically good for MySQL (the product, not the company). Either Oracle will push MySQL aggressively to block Microsoft SQLServer at the lower end of the market, or Oracle will view MySQL as a competitor to its own flagship product and discourage its use. Either way, MySQL will gain energy. In the latter case, its Open Source version will attract more developers and become more popular. (Thank goodness for the GPL, which prevents Oracle from killing it off!)

In any case, my favourite Open Source databases are Ingres, followed by PostgreSQL. MySQL, to my mind, is a distraction.

Oracle must be suffering J2EE app server indigestion. GlassFish would be their fifth app server, I think. (The previous four being AS, iAS, Orion and WebLogic). Good for all of us that the J2EE/JEE app server market is consolidating (read shrinking) with only a few big players left now (IBM with WebSphere, Oracle with whatever they choose as their flagship from their distended line-up and JBoss, whose market seems to have disappeared at about the same time as Marc Fleury disappeared with his millions). I'm a strong proponent of Spring/Tomcat, so the sooner these dinosaurs die out, the happier I'll be.

I'm not sure what this means for OpenOffice. Both IBM and Oracle would dearly love to poke Microsoft in the eye, though I can't tell who would have been a more effective seller of OpenOffice into the corporate market. With either, I don't believe corporate customers would find OpenOffice any cheaper than MS-Office. Microsoft can actually breathe easier now. Having Oracle push Open Source makes Microsoft sound truthful when it talks about Open Source being more expensive than its own products.

What about Web Services? Will Oracle want to pursue interoperability with Microsoft the way Sun did with Project Tango? One could argue that it really doesn't matter. The increasing popularity of REST is making SOAP-based Web Services less relevant with each passing day. It is only the blindest SOA practitioners, with their heads buried deepest inside corporate caves, who remain ignorant of REST.

Sun has recently developed a strong line of Identity Management products (OpenDS, OpenSSO, etc.) I wonder what Oracle will do with them.

I sometimes wonder about Oracle's strategy. They've bought so many disparate products and forced them into that clumsy box called Oracle Fusion that it's beginning to look like Oracle Confusion.

But the bottomline after all the analysis is, I believe, still Java. Thankfully, most of Java is now GPL-ed, so if Oracle doesn't behave, there should be a strong community push (with IBM's backing, no doubt) to "unencumber" the last few Java libraries and truly set it free.

It's going to be an interesting year.

AMQP Lurches Towards Completion

I really mean the word "lurches" that I used in the title of this post. I've been following the AMQP specification since the 0.8 version, and there have been more dramatic twists and turns in this than in an old Perry Mason novel. (In the latest twist, they seem to have dropped the very concept of an Exchange, a mainstay of previous versions).

I don't believe the latest version of the spec is available (I would dearly love to have a read), but the working group met recently in San Diego, and the materials presented are here.

My overall reactions are these:

1. We really do need an industry-standard messaging protocol to match the capabilities of proprietary products like IBM's MQ and TIBCO's EMS. These two vendors have built their hugely profitable businesses at the expense of customers who have nowhere else to go. The commoditisation that has lowered prices in other areas of distributed computing (TCP/IP for networking, HTTP for web, SMTP for email, etc.) has simply not occurred in enterprise messaging. AMQP aims to rectify that. All I can say is, "It's about time".

2. I note with amusement that Microsoft has joined the AMQP bandwagon. Nothing like a lack of market share to elicit good behaviour from Microsoft ;-)

3. As I said, I don't have access to the latest spec, but I know that an intermediate version had dropped support for streaming communications and file transfer. If these are still not part of the spec, I believe that's a huge mistake. An enterprise messaging protocol must natively support these significant aspects of distributed computing, otherwise the protocol as a whole will fail to pass muster in spite of its excellence in other areas.

4. I don't know what the AMQP Working Group is thinking, but I believe that the main competition for AMQP is not IBM and TIBCO but HTTP and REST. Whenever I talk to REST afficionados about AMQP, the response is a big ho-hum. "What can AMQP do that we can't already do with HTTP?" is the response. Asynchronous notification? Just use XMPP for that. Security? SSL is good enough. And so on. The AMQP Working Group should co-opt a particular breed of REST expert - one who understands the value of resource-orientation without being wedded to HTTP. I believe that if we can define an application protocol on top of the transport protocol that AMQP is (by usefully constraining it with special verbs, headers and status codes), we will have a more capable architectural style than REST, one which includes native support for event notification, end-to-end security, reliable message delivery, transactions, file transfer, streaming communications and process coordination. Rohit Khare's ARRESTED style can become a reality.

Is anyone listening?

Java's Centre of Gravity Has Shifted

I was amused to read this slant on the rumours of IBM's takeover of Sun.

No, it wasn't industry analysts who were being asked their views on the merger. It was Rod Johnson, original developer of the Spring framework and CEO of SpringSource.

SpringSource isn't an IBM or an Oracle in size. Outside of the most tech-savvy segment of the Java development community, SpringSource and Rod Johnson are virtual unknowns. Yet the press was beating a path to this man's door. That in itself was somewhat surprising. Even more surprising was that Rod's reaction to what should have been major industry news was rather ho-hum. His reasoning was that in recent times, Java middleware has been influenced more by Open Source and independent developers than by large corporations, so it really doesn't matter either way if the merger goes ahead or not.

I tend to agree, with one caveat. The roadmap for an Open Source Java is still murky, and I'd like this to be clarified before I'm willing to yawn at the irrelevant plans of corporate titans. There are those like Stephen Colebourne who have almost a conspiracy theory about Sun's plans for Java. While I hope they're wrong, I too would like to see an open Java 7 specification that can be implemented by anyone and be certified as such.

If I can't have an open Java specification, I'm willing to settle for at least one safely Open Source (i.e., GPL-ed) implementation of Java, but I'm disappointed even there. Java is still not 100% Open Source. It still suffers from "encumbered code". There are a few libraries that have not been released under the GPL, and that is a lingering source of worry.

But in the main, Rod Johnson is right. A few years ago, JBoss began to shift the centre of gravity of Java away from the Weblogics of the J2EE world towards a more lightweight, Open Source implementation of J2EE. Today, that wrenching movement has continued with the marginalisation of J2EE itself.

I believe that Spring and Tomcat are ringing the death knell for heavyweight Java. If Java becomes a 100% open platform with a completely open specification and at least one completely GPL-ed implementation, then it won't matter which industry heavyweight buys which. It will be a mating of dinosaurs in the age of mammals.