Heading to Brazil (actually I am in Sao Paulo) on my way to FISL - one of wildest open source events of the year in Porto Alegre.  I'll be giving a talk on GlassFish and Java EE 6 along with a whole contingent from Sun who'll be talking about all things Java and OpenSolaris.  So far they have 6100 folks signed up for the conference which runs from Thursday thru Saturday.

And... now ATA has declared bankruptcy eliminating more capacity to Hawaii. ATA was kind of a bottom feeder carrier anyway, but this did come out of the blue sky and crashed into Oakland airport where ATA just quit w/ no advanced notice (unlike Aloha that was at least nice about it).  With the loss of nearly 10% of mainland to Hawaii capacity and the fact that Untied and American fly with nearly full planes, fares to Hawaii doubled last night!  Yes doubled.  I would expect them to drop as the big guys add capacity and figure out how to rebalance their flights.  I would also guess they would get a bit of pressure from the Governor of Hawaii as they are very dependent on tourists from the mainland.   

Aloha is really, really shut down.  When I called their phone line to ask about my existing reservation I listened to a recording and was then told to contact my travel agent (in this case myself) about rebooking.  They are gone.  So as my own travel agent, I called my credit card company and filed a dispute over the charge (which I had not paid for yet) for a service that was clearly not going to be delivered.  Fortunately, the card company will cover the charge.  Next I rebooked my flights on American Airlines which I am pretty sure won't go out of business between now and Summer.  Lesson learned - it is good to pay for a high value visa card and be a customer in good standing so they will take care of things like this!

Alas, Aloha Airlines - that venerable symbol of Hawaii filed for bankruptcy recently and today announced they are no longer flying.  March 31 (today) is that last day they will fly!  Of course I bought tix on Aloha for a trip later this summer so I am now seeing if United (their partner) will honor the tix or if my credit card company can help.   Although bad for me (any my vacation), this is an even worse blow to those who work for Aloha who have jobs no more.  The airline business is a very competitive, cut-throat affair and you have to be nimble to survive.  I would guess that that Aloha's problems have been around for some time and were exacerbated by their failure to expand their mainland-to-island flights to ensure some cash generating long haul flights.  When a competitor came in to the inter-island business Aloha did not have the financial ability to react!  Add this to the steep increased in fuel costs and Aloha seems to have been trapped by low fare competitors and the high cost of gas.  Check and mate!

Well, my mom's hard drive died on her - puking out the blue-screen-of-vista-death.  After spending an hour on the phone w/ Dell support in India she learned that her computer didn't work!  However,  they did not propose to fix it or help out.  The box comes with a 1 year in-home warranty so they should have fixed it right?  So she called me and I phone Dell, outraged! As it turns out they did file a report about a hard drive crash, but the passive tech support guy did nothing more (kind of like going to Kaiser to see your doctor - you have to be assertive or they won't fix you either).  So I managed to get them to admit that a hard drive crash after 6 months IS a warranty item and they agreed to replace it. Not only that, they sent someone out w/ an imaged disk to replace it at my mom's home. And, if you can believe this, they even showed up on time. On the promised day!  Now my mom's computer is back up and running, but with all that ad-ware that Dell so conveniently provides.  Well maybe there is hope for Dell yet!

My next step is to remove the adware and install CrossLoop an opensource  VNC application that allows me to take control of her desktop remotely so I can help her w/ email and Firefox.  So far it works really, really well and does exactly what I need it to do - saving me a trip to her house to show her how to print documents!

I bought the family pack for Leopard to upgrade all my machines back in November.  I was waiting, however, for the first big patch to be released before I did the upgrade (I am an earlyish adopter of tech, not a bleeding-edge adopter) because I just didn't want to deal w/ glitches on my work laptop. Well Apple just released 10.5 update  BEAST (all 347 MB of it !!)

The standard upgrade went well (I did back up my data to and external drive) and took about 1 1/2 hours. Then I went into work to download the BEAST and with Sun's big pipes that took just a few minutes (less than 5, I think).  I ran the installer (another 5 minutes or so) and it worked great.

 Now, After 24 hours, everything is stable and I've noticed no problems.  Nor have I noticed my Mac running any slower or faster - its just about the same.  All programs work, all data is there, none of my documents or pictures were lost.  I had 2 very minor issues 1) I had to reinstall my printers and 2) I had to reinstall PocketMac to sync my BlackBerry. 

Today Covalent Technologies (the guys who provide commercial support for all things Apache) was acquired by SpringSource.  So after Sun acquires the "M" in LAMP Spring buys the "A".  Since the "L" is distributed among many companies and the "P" is not really something you can buy, it looks like the LAMP stack is now all locked up.  This is a maturing step for Open Source.  As more and more people use open source, the inevitable questions are "how can I get support" and "where do I go to download a fully integrated stack from a trusted source".  As the components of LAMP move into commercial companies that can provide the level of support that enterprises are looking for, open source becomes a more viable alternative to closed source.  Sun already provides support for the SAMP stack and with the acquisition of MySQL look for those support offerings to be even more robust.

If you search thru Linux Debian packages you will find that GlassFish has now been included!  This was not something done by Sun engineers to "push" GlassFish into Debian (although we were working on that), but rather a "pull" from some engineers to package GlassFish for Debian.  I am certain that the work done to package GlassFish for Ubuntu had something to do with the packaging work for Debian,  however, I don't discount the amount of work that was done to make it happen.  They (I don't know who did it) removed the Maven build dependency and substituted Ant.  This just continues to show the momentum that GlassFish is getting.    Add to this our monthly average download numbers, which are higher than any other open source app server and the positive feedback we get from the software analysts on GlassFish and I think we are starting to turn the corner on awareness.  Thanks to the folks working on the Debian project!

Verizon announced today that they are opening their network to all compatible phones and services.  For years, Verizon has had the "walled garden" business model where they control everything.  This means that all services have had to go thru Verizon so you could not acquire applications or ringtones unless you paid Verizon.  As a result, it cost more to download a stupid 15 second ringtone than it cost to download the entire song (in high quality).  Remember when Verizon offered a service to backup your contacts OTA for...$3 / month?  That kind of price gouging didn't work, no one bought it and eventually, they offered it for free because it caused them less work when someone had to replace a phone.  The walled garden model spilled over to what Vzn let consumers do with their phones.  My phone has bluetooth, but it only works with a headset - I cannot sync data wirelessly with it!  Why? Well Verizon wants me to sync my data with their servers for a fee and then resync it w/ my phone. It will be a cold day in hell before I do that and I take great pleasure in syncing my device with a cable knowing that eveytime I do I am sticking it to the man!  It is this kind of perversion of the market that Verizon lived on and I and everyone else hated it. 

 
This latest move, of course, is clearly a reaction to the market in which Apple opened their iPhone and Google is going to offer SAAS via the Web.  The only way for Verizon to stay relevant in this market where people have access to free services, is to open their network. This move parallels the open source movement - make it open and they will come and innovate.  By opening the network, Verizon will encourage development of new and innovative services that will provide me something I want at a reasonable price.  For Verizon, this means an erosion of their business model (think large holes in the walled garden) as they have to rely more on revenue from moving bits and less on revenue from overpriced applications and services. Tearing the wall down will ultimately be good for everyone.  The really useful services from Verizon will continue to sell, new services and phones will bring more people to their network and drive volume on their towers thus lowering their costs (which will ultimately be passed onto us thru lower prices or more minutes).

The $199 Everex computer running Linux is "sold out" at Wal Mart online.    After Dell led the market by offering Ubuntu on its systems, who would have figured that Wal Mart would emerge as a leader in moving Linux boxes?  I doubt the buyers care that much about Linux.  What they care about is getting a low cost computer that is easy to use (read none of those annoying "an application is about to launch" windows warnings popping up every time you want to do something) and lets computer novices access the internet.  This is the back-to-the-future version of the Web TV that my mother used to use to get email.  Once she graduated from just email the next step was crossing the river Styx to an over developed Windows Vista box which confuses her to no end.  If this simple preconfigured Linux box (with support) was available 6 months ago I would have bought it for her.  Maybe this is the start of the OCPG (one computer per grandparent)?

This is FOSS doing what it is supposed to do - providing "just enough" features / utility for an underserved market.  FOSS doesn't do everything, but what it does, it does well and the market seems to like that.



 

I was at the Sun internal open source conference for the past 2 days. Our keynote speaker was Jonathan Schwartz and it was interesting to hear him talk about his strategy and, this is the key bit to me, his frustration with the inability of employees, customers and partners of understanding our open source message. He, like me, constantly gets a question that goes like this: “Now that our sw is free why do we need a sales force and how do we expect to make money?”  Jonathan answered this in a very simple way by pointing to a download map that shows all the ISPs from which our sw was downloaded.  He points out that our software (in this case lets use GlassFish)  is being downloaded in more regions than we sales people (Sun has no sales people, for instance, in Madagascar).   By reaching these people we now have much broader distribution than we could have ever gotten by having to ship out sw CDs upon request or by having expensive sales people call on these developers.

Next he points out that Sun's main customers, those large enterprises that see sw as a competitive advantage, they embrace  the idea of free sw, but will always buy a subscription or service contract because they cannot afford to ever have down time. The cost of downtime to a bank, a financial exchange or a shipping company is so large that the cost of a subscription to Sun's commercial sw packages is a very minor expense.  

To summarize, the free people will never pay for support, but eventually they might get a job with the enterprises that do and Sun will benefit because these developers are familiar with Sun's products and that's good for us. Enterprises will always buy support and it is them that we target with our commercial distributions of open source.   I think the ultimate answer is in the revenue and profitability of our sw division and at some point our financial people might disclose that information separately and we will have data on which to judge this revenue model.

Oracle Burys Buys BEA for the diabolical sum of $6.66 Billion!  What deal is the Darth Vadar of sw companies getting into now?  Certainly alot of people will make money on this, not the least of which is Carl Icahn who's 13.2 % stake in BEA just jumped 20% making him a $200 Million profit!  But what does this mean to the App server community?  If this merger goes like many of the other Oracle assimilation projects, I would expect the BEA app server to slowly disappear like the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.  BEA will stay around in name but their competing app server will slowly starve to death. This is a shame because BEA has a pretty good product.  They have specialized in targeting vertical markets, namely telco, while Oracle has focussed their app server on whatever advantages their database.  I feel for BEA's employees who are about to undergo the assimilation process and who see their years of work on the app server in jeopardy.

However, we have an alternative for you.  Where Oracle focuses on data base and tools the GlassFish community focuses on Open Source and community.  If you want to have input as to what features you need in an app server, come to GlassFish - as an open source community you get not only a voice in the direction of the product, you can make any changes / improvements you want AND get one of the fastest app servers around - and definitely FASTER than BEA.  As for those of you who fear that your investment in BEA is now devalued, we have a FREE tool to migrate you from BEA to GlassFish that you can download here.  To my BEA friends, come join us @ GlassFish, the water's just fine!

Open Source implementations need to be available to run on the OSs that developers prefer and this fact is not
lost on Sun. In addition to our efforts to get our open source implementations distributed with Linux we also ensure they work on Windows and Mac OS X.  The latest version of GlassFish is now available for download from the Apple Developer site.  GlassFish for Mac OS X.    

Also, OpenDS is available from the same site.  OpenDS for MaxOS X

 

GlassFish V2 is released today!  It includes a whole list of features that are useful to enterprise deployments like clustering, administration, failover protection, Web Services interoperability AND record breaking performance to boot! You can read about the details here.  What is really interesting, is that this underscores the ability of the free and open software community to create great software.  Not just good, but great.  Many people think of open source sw as poor cousins of "real" or commercial sw and that is just not the case here.  GlassFish beat BEA's app server by 10% in the latest SpecjAppServer 2004 tests to show that the open source community can not only deliver sw on schedule but do so with high performance.  Browse here to download the latest bits.