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I go on one small trip to LinuxWorld London, and the whole Open Source/Free Software business landscape changes whilst I'm away. It's very disconcerting and a lot of change to keep track of, especially whilst being on the road. I'm talking about the Oracle announcement about Red Hat, and the Microsoft/Novell partnership deal.
Let's talk about the Oracle announcement first. In case you have been living under a rock for the past month (or like me, at your brother's house in Sheffield) Oracle announced they would directly compete with Red Hat in the Linux support businesses. The wrinkle is, they are going to do it using Red Hat's own Linux software, not by creating “Oracle Linux”. They're planning to undercut the price Red Hat charges for Enterprise support by fifty percent. What allows them to do this without legal issues of course is the GNU GPL license that much of a Linux distribution is distributed under. The GNU GPL gives Oracle the same distribution rights to the software that Red Hat has.
People used to claim that the GNU GPL license was anti-competitive. I think for the first time we're beginning to see what a truly free market in software might look like. It looks pretty good for the customers actually. Here we have two global companies, admittedly one much larger than the other, competing to support the same software. Imagine if you had an option in where you could buy support for bugs in Microsoft software. I think the prices for Windows Vista and other new offerings might be significantly lower for the customers, instead of an effective price rise by releasing six new versions of Winodws, only the most expensive of which will be useful for many customers.
The nasty part of the Oracle announcement however, is that Red Hat created the software distribution that Oracle is offering to support. Note that Red Hat didn't write all of it, but they are the people who integrated it and did the testing to make sure it all works together. Some would say that Oracle is leaching off Red Hat's work, and is merely trying to damage Red Hat enough to make them an easy take-over target.
Business in Silicon Valley can be pretty brutal. Red Hat recently bought the JBoss company, that rumor had it Oracle was interested in. Rumor also has it that this latest announcement from Oracle is a form of payback for Red Hat snatching Oracle's prize from its jaws. Larry Ellison (the founder of Oracle) isn't known for his polite businesses tactics. This should be a lot of fun to watch going forward.
To be honest I don't really fear for Red Hat. They created their own distribution, and have been successfully supporting it for a long time. If Oracle thinks they can do better they are welcome to try, but if they're doing this just as a strategy to punish Red Hat for some previous slight they suffered then I think they won't have the commitment needed to follow this though. As another Open Source evangelist working at a large company here in the Valley said of Oracle's plan; “Sometimes intent matters”. If they're doing it just to screw over Red Hat rather than truly moving into the Linux business then I think they'll fail.
The other change that occurred is more difficult for me to discuss. Being completely honest, this is the first time that my job has seriously interfered with me expressing my opinions freely in this column or elsewhere. In case you didn't know Novell is my employer, and so although I need to talk about this important event, I am going to be very clear that everything I say here is my own opinion and not that of Novell. As I like to say when talking about Samba and working for Novell, Novell don't speak for Samba, so I don't speak for them.
Novell signed a co-operation agreement with Microsoft around interoperability, virtualization, and also a patent covenant with Microsoft to protect Novell's customers from any lawsuits from Microsoft, and to protect Microsoft's customers from lawsuits from Novell. I am extremely happy with some aspects of the agreement, mainly in that it shows that Microsoft has finally turned a corner and has stopped calling Linux a “cancer” and “communism” but has finally begun to try and make money from it. I have actually argued with them that they should do that for years, and have tried to suggest ways to Microsoft executives that they can start sharing in the same advantages that Open Source/Free Software brings that other software companies have achieved.
But they have to do it on the terms of Free Software/Open Source, not enforced terms. In other words, they have to learn to share and agree on the terms of the GNU GPL licensing. Something that all other companies benefiting from Free Software/Open Source have learned and agreed to do. Without going in to too much detail I'm not sure that they've done that in the patent covenant part of the agreement.
Happily the Samba Team has no such prohibitions on expressing our opinions, and so the join opinion of the Samba Team may be read online here :
http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/
Just to give you an idea of the opinion from the title, it's “Samba Team Asks Novell to Reconsider”.
Finally I'll regain my geek credentials by reminding readers of an episode of the wonderful Sci-Fi series “Babylon 5”. It's strangely appropriate to this situation. Microsoft's Mr. Morden asks Ambassador Londo Mollari of the Centauri an interesting question. I'll repeat the exchange here :
All Babylon 5 fans know how that turned out for the Centauri. If you don't, I enthusiastically suggest you check out the DvDs of the show. Many hours happy TV watching, and you'll polish your own geek credentials too.