Whenever I talk with a company on a mission, my Spidey Sense starts tingling (or maybe that's just my iPhone on vibrate). But here's the thing about Talend's quest to "democratize the ESB market:" It may be a marketing slogan, but it's one that clarifies, and that's depressingly rare.
"What we mean by democratization," said Pat Walsh, VP of marketing in Talend's new Application Integration Division, "is not only the attractive economics that open source products provide to our customers, but it's also about accessibility to users. Oftentimes these types of products can be complex and difficult to use, and we -- along with the open source community -- are making them easier to use."
The Los Altos, Calif.-based company has earned a reputation as a provider of affordable data management products for the little guy, thanks largely to its open source approach. This week the company added to that reputation with the launch of a production-ready version of the open source Apache Camel project. The new Talend Integration Factory uses Camel patterns to make message-based system integration easier to implement and more scalable.
Apache Camel is the open source, Java-based integration framework based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. (A must read.)
"Camel takes the concept and provides a vocabulary for application integration developers," Walsh told me, "so that they can take what are fairly complex implementations of integration and have a common language and set of templates that allow them to be more productive as they use tools and build out their integration solutions and projects. We've incorporated that into the Talend Integration Factory."
This is the second in a set of product releases stemming from the company's acquisition last year of Sopera, a spin-off from Deutsche Post that developed software and solutions for the SOA/ESB market, also from open source. The first was the Talend Service Factory, a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF, launched in December 2010.
A list of product features is available on the company's website, but a few are worth underscoring:
- This release comes pre-configured in a single installable package, ready to deploy in such environments as OSGi, Apache Tomcat, JEE servers and standalone JVM.
- Its component-based architecture supports a broad set of protocols (http, https, ftp, xmpp rss, and more), data formats (EDI, JSON, CSV, HL7), and languages (JS, Python, Scala).
- And my favorite: It comes with documented examples "based on real-world experience implementing integration solutions."
The Talend Integration Factory is available now. The Community Edition is available under the Apache Public License v2 can be downloaded for freesies here. It's also integrated with Talend’s Data Integration products.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 16, 20110 comments
On Tuesday, a bit more than a year after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, and with it the stewardship of Java, the database giant invited the public to a webcast that promised to provide a "state of the union address" on Java under Oracle's watch. But the company's fireside chat failed to address the hottest topics sparked during its first 12 months in that role.
During the webcast, dubbed "Java and Oracle, One Year Later," Justine Kestelyn, director of the Oracle Technology Network, tossed softball questions to Ajay Patel, vice president of product development for Oracle's application grid products group.
Patel emphasized that Oracle's goal is to drive Java adoption, make the platform more competitive, make it more relevant and make it more modular. "Things got stalled over the past couple of years," he said. They "came to a grinding halt… The community has been waiting to move the platform forward." The OpenJDK is the perfect way to do that, he insisted
Patel also talked about the decision to appoint Bruno F. Souza, former president of Brazilian Java user group, SouJava, to the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process. User groups are the "heart and soul" of the Java community, Patel declared, adding, "This is a community drive effort, not just an Oracle driven effort."
"The Java community has many hearts and souls, of course," observed Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk. "But if you were to pick one [type of] community, it'd be hard to go wrong with user groups. Java user groups may not be as powerful as they used to, at least in the U.S., but they're still a significant part of the community. The proof? User groups are pretty much volunteer-led. For some there are incentives to get involved -- free stuff, networking, fame, etc. -- but you can look at the participation as driven mostly by the user group members passion."
But there was no mention of the reason for the vacancy Souza is filling: namely, the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) decision to quit the JCP EC in December. The non-profit organization behind more than 100 open-source projects had been threatening to leave the organization for some time. When the JCP executive committee voted to approve Java SE 7, which the ASF opposed, the group walked.
Nor was there any discussion of the dispute that lead to the ASF's decision: Oracle's refusal to provide the ASF with a test compatibility kit (TCK) license for its own Java SE implementation, Project Harmony. Without the TCK, Harmony cannot be tested and certified against the Java standard.
Of the Web cast, Mark Driver, research director at the Gartner Group, said: "This was essentially a little cheerleading session...We learned nothing we didn't already know, and they managed to avoid talking about the elephants standing right next to them."
Driver found Patel's comment that Oracle will "drive the pace of innovation" in the Java community telling: "You can't do that and have an open community," he said. "I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. When you have a stalemate, nothing gets done. At some point, if you can't come to a compromise, someone has got to lose. But you can't then maintain that it's just as open as it was before. It's just not."
"To the traditional enterprise audience, that message is going to be just fine," Driver added. "There are an awful lot of customers out there, worldwide, who have invested billions of dollars in Java technology. All they really care about is running their businesses. And that's the traditional Oracle customer. That's who they listen to, and what their business is built on."
To an audience question about how Oracle is planning to fill the other open seats on the JCP, Patel said that the company was interested in adding "an end-user perspective." He said that Oracle had talked to large banks and telcos about joining the JCP EC. "We want to find someone who represents a user..." he said. "We want to mix it up a little bit..." and "bring the customers in."
"That makes perfect sense if you want to promote the use of established 'users,'" said Coté. "Big enterprises certainly use Java and depend on many existing applications (off the shelf and custom) that are built on Java. I'd suggest that Oracle probably knows how much revenue is generated by such big customers and, thus, how important they are to the financial side of the Java world. It's actually a good idea to give big spending users like that a seat at the table."
But the community also needs the important innovations from members with "shallow pockets," Coté added.
"So called 'community' people like to complain about moneyed interests invading the community, as big banks and telcos aren't part of that community. But I think what they're really worried about is… money talking instead of useful, innovative ideas winning out, no matter how expensively dressed those ideas are. As long as board members' decisions make sure to (a.) keep existing Java applications stable and working, and, (b.) advance the platform with new innovations as fast as possible, they'll be doing a good job. That's how I'd rate any member, threadbare or sartorially sophisticated."
Patel also made no mention ofOracle's lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements when it comes to Android. But he did spend a lot of time talking about the Glassfish app server, which Oracle now sees as the reference implementation for Java EE. He said that the company had seen increased downloads of both Glassfish and the NetBeans IDE.
And apparently lots of people have been calling for a separate JavaOne conference. Patel said that it was "the number one conversation in the [Oracle] executive offices."
"People want one marque JavaOne event," he said, "like the one in SF."
"JavaOne used to be the event for Java developers," Coté said, "and a significant one for the development world in general. Folding it into Oracle OpenWorld sends the wrong signal (Oracle is more important than Java: it wasn't SunOne) and probably makes some Java people not want to attend. The Java world is much bigger than the Oracle world and it definitely deserves its own conference, if only in name."
Posted by John K. Waters on February 15, 20110 comments
The recently published report from Forrester Research on the future of Java under Oracle is getting a lot of attention, as well it should. (We covered it in "Future of Java 'Constrained by Oracle's Business Model,' Analysts Say." But another new Forrester report not in the spotlight shouldn't go unnoticed.
In "WebSphere 7 Reaffirms IBM's Java Platform Lead," Forrester analyst John R. Rymer (who co-authored the aforementioned paper) declares, "With the seventh generation of its WebSphere software, IBM redefines the state of the art in Java platforms."
A strong statement, but Rymer backs it up. He observes that WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 7 was "years in the making" as IBM worked out the kinks in the app server specs, and then integrated the app server into WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Commerce and other high-level platforms.
The result, he says, is a WebSphere 7 product family that provides developers with "new ways to optimize their application architectures; more development frameworks; automatic transactional reliability; simpler configuration and management; and improved stack integration for BPM, portal, and eCommerce projects."
Big Blue has set its core app server on a path to become a Java transaction monitor, Rymer notes, adding "WAS's reliability features now provide a foundation for highly reliable Java distributed systems, just as IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS) did for an earlier technology generation."
For development organizations that are struggling with scale, complexity and high performance in their Java applications, Rymer says, WebSphere 7 "may offer both relief and a simpler, easier-to-manage stack."
The report, which includes contributions from Forrester analysts Mike Gualtieri, Jeffrey S. Hammond, Mike Gilpin, and Alissa Anderson, is available here but it isn't free. Fortunately, Rymer offers a useful summary of his conclusions on his blog. And that's a freebie.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20110 comments
Cisco Systems says Java vulnerabilities are now exploited more often than holes in Adobe's Acrobat and Reader applications.
The networking giant's 2010 Annual Security Report states that in January 2010, Java exploits accounted for only 1.5 percent of Web malware blocked by the company's ScanSafe software. By November, that number had jumped to 7 percent, Cisco says. Meanwhile, PDF exploits were declining. In January, they totaled just over 6 percent of Web malware blocked by ScanSafe, and by November that number had dropped to just 2 percent.
Java, Adobe's Reader and Acrobat, and Flash were the most common attack targets during the first half of 2010, the report found.
Why do the black hats have a new favorite target? One possibility, Cisco suggests, is the increased availability of public Java exploit code and the decreased availability of public Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat exploits. Also, end users are beginning to favor alternative PDF readers, and those who still prefer Adobe's software are tending to disable JavaScript and Flash. Consequently, PDF exploits simply aren't succeeding as often.
"Online criminals pay close attention to the success and failure rates of their exploits," the report states. "As of late 2010, it became clear that they feel Java is a gold mine."
Flaws in Java have made it "a promising target for criminals," the report states. The Blackhole, Crimepack, and Eleonore exploit software packages, for example, make heavy use of Java. All three are available for sale.
On of Java's strengths -- its multiplatform interoperability -- is also a weakness. It makes it easier for scammers to distribute malware across several platforms and devices (including mobile gear) running Java. And because Java works in the background, users tend not to keep track of necessary security updates. It's easy enough for criminal hackers to configure malware to check for older versions of Java during exploits.
"Cybercriminals aim their campaigns at software programs, devices and operating systems where they can reach the widest net of potential victims," the report states. "...At this point, Java appears to be the greater threat."
I would love to hear from Java jocks on this report. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20111 comments
I wrapped up the working side of 2010 by catching up with one of my favorite software development gurus, David Intersimone, best known as "David I." He calls himself a "code junkie'; I'd call him a programmer's programmer. He worked for more than two decades at Borland, the company that invented the IDE; then CodeGear, the company that emerged from Borland's decision to shed its tools business; and he's now Vice President of developer relations and Chief Evangelist at Embarcadero Technologies.
We talked about a lot of stuff, including how he manages to get a seal on his scuba mask over that Dumbledore beard of his. But we eventually hunkered down on a topic that has been occupying him lately: developing for the cloud.
"I think we've made it through all these overloaded terms like software-as-a-service and mashups," Intersimone told me. "Now we're at the point where we can say, we've got clients and we've got servers, and in between them there are protocols and APIs. That's the real world."
The cloud is more a less a manifestation of that real world, he said, and it's improving the lives of developers by allowing them to employ the standards and the architectures they use when building desktop client-server multitier applications with the added ability to deploy very rich clients "all over the place."
"It's so easy now to configure and provision an instance of a server, inside or outside the firewall," he said, "and then build all sorts of clients, including a simple HTML/JavaScript browser client, or a simple client built with Xcode and REST connectivity for the iPad or the iPhone, or with simple Java for Blackberry and Android, or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7."
Because developers can use the tools and tricks they've already mastered when developing for the cloud, they don't have to create something completely different to service all these platforms. It's a Linux or Windows executable, or it's a REST server, or a SOAP server.
"I'm a developer," he said. "I want to build applications. I don't want to force everything into being a browser container -- unless my app wants to have a browser container inside the application. If I can do that, I can get anywhere. I can build a browser client. Or I can deliver a nice executable that has an affinity for the way an iPhone works, an iPad works, or a Blackberry device works."
Intersimone has a nice example online that he points to during his travels. It's a Web site called "Fish Facts" He built a DataSnap server in Delphi that serves up native code, REST code, and PHP. (Intersimone is a certified, Open Water II SCUBA diver, which I guess explains the fish.)
"All you need to do is to give the connectivity library for REST and the JSON parsing view with the packets encrypting them, and you can build clients in anything," he said. "There's a REST library for anything and a JASON parser library for every kind of device that I know of. So you put all your logic elsewhere."
DataSnap, of course, is Embarcadero's software for RAD development of multi-tier database apps for the Win32 environment. Devs can use Delphi or C++ Builder to create Data Broker/Client applications with TCP/IP, DCOM, HTTP or SOAP transport protocols.
Intersimone's advice for developers in this increasingly cloudy world?
"Keep doing what you're doing, but keep an eye out for ways you can house your functionality in these reusable server objects, rather than rewriting them completely," he said. "Then look at the protocols of the Internet and start thinking about how you can build clients that can talk to all that infrastructure."
Also, pay attention to existing and emerging privacy policies -- especially in Europe. Privacy is going to be one of the big issues for developers going forward, he said. Keep in mind what you have to do to scale properly in the cloud. And don't believe anyone with a write-one-run-anywhere pitch.
"Today it's all about connectivity, about building native applications and sticking them on a server somewhere, and then connecting to them via whatever protocols you want from any device," he said.
Code Gear, the company that first took over Borland's IDE business, including JBuilder, Developer Studio and a reinvented version of the Turbo line, was acquired by Embarcadero in 2008, but most of the crew that formed that entity are still there, Intersimone said. Their offices have been moved from the venerable Borland campus in Scotts Valley -- one of the first Silicon Valley corporate office complexes to earn the "campus" label back in the day -- to a building across the highway.
David I's blog, "Sip from the Firehose," is a worthy addition to your online reading. I got a particular kick out of his charmingly goofy "A Developer's Night Before Christmas" holiday poem.
Posted by John K. Waters on January 21, 20110 comments
Here's a MySQL announcement that surprisingly didn't make the news last week: The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just formed a new advisory group made up of MySQL community leaders and subject matter experts.
The membership roster of the new MySQL Council includes some prominent names in MySQL Land. Here's the list:
- Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko
- Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB
- Bradley Kuszmaul, Tokutek
- Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
- Rob Wultsch, GoDaddy.com
- Matt Yonkovit, Percona
Sarah Novotny will serve as Council chairperson. The company she founded with J.J. Ecker and Chuck Edwards started out providing DBA services to users of Oracle's E-Business Suite in 2001, and now provides those services for Oracle, Oracle Applications, MySQL and SQL Server. So her appointment seems like a nice fit.
Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB's Database Operations Manager, writes a lot about MySQL on her company blog, which I recommend. She wrote The MySQL Administrator's Bible (with Keith Murphy, Wiley, 2009).
Bradley Kuszmaul is the founder and chief architect at Tokutek, where he is commercializing research he conducted at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to speed up the maintenance of rich database indexes.
Giuseppe Maxia, a.k.a. "The Data Charmer," is a well-known figure in MySQL circles. He was the MySQL community team lead at Sun Microsystems; he now serves as the Director of Quality Assurance at Continuent.
Rob Wultsch is a senior MySQL DBA at Internet service provider GoDaddy.com; check out his "Everything MySQL" page.
Matt Yonkovit is principal consultant and infrastructure architect at Percona; he worked at MySQL and Sun Microsystems as a solution architect; check out his "Big DBA Head" blog.
"We are pleased to welcome these MySQL evangelists and volunteer leaders to IOUG," IOUG president Andy Flower said in a statement. "Their passion, independent perspectives, experience and collective knowledge of MySQL will provide a solid framework for us to support our members and those interested in the MySQL evolution. Their collective expert user perspective, insight and counsel will be leveraged as a respected voice of the MySQL community into Oracle…"
The formation of this new council is one of the IOUG's first big moves to embrace MySQL under Oracle. Flowers goes on to state: "In addition, the IOUG looks forward to providing education and proven best practices to the IOUG membership and Oracle customer community along with presenting unbiased viewpoints on MySQL trends and data.”
Which leads us to what really caught my eye about this announcement: the note in the press release that the new council will be "prominently involved" in the IOUG's COLLABORATE 11 conference, scheduled for April 10-14 in Orlando, Fla. This year's event will include a new conference within a conference focused on MySQL, with more than 75 sessions covering such topics as "Monitoring MySQL with Oracle Grid Control,""MySQL Troubleshooting 101,""SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies," and "The 7 (or So) Deadly MySQL Performance Sins."
Meanwhile, O'Reilly Media's annual MySQL Conference and Expo is set for virtually the same dates as the IOUG event (April 11-14), though it'll take place on the other side of the country in Santa Clara, Calif. Another potential conflict: Sarah Novotny is listed as a member of the O'Reilly event's program committee.
The O'Reilly event has been around for a while, so there's an old-school MySQL history there. It'll be interesting to see if and/or how the perception of MySQL under Oracle will differ at these two independent industry events.
Posted by John K. Waters on January 18, 20111 comments
It's been a dramatic couple of weeks in Java Land. The headline grabber was the departure from the JCP of the Apache Software Foundation. Losing the ASF was a blow, to be sure, but I'm not so sure it's fair to paint Oracle as the bad guy in what is a long-standing dispute that goes back to Sun Microsystems' stewardship of Java.
The ASF has been objecting to the decision -- first Sun's, then Oracle's -- not to provide the ASF with a test compatibility kit (TCK) license for its own Java SE implementation, Project Harmony, since 2006. Without the TCK, Harmony can't be tested and certified against the Java standard. This decision, in the ASF's words, "imposes additional terms and conditions that are not compatible with open source or Free software licenses." The agreement under which Oracle and the ASF participate in the JCP entitles the ASF to a license for the TCK that will allow the organization to test and distribute a release of the Apache Harmony project under the Apache License, the ASF has argued.
Neither Sun nor Oracle wanted to see a parallel implementation of Java, so they were never going to give the ASF the TCK
And yet it was the JCP Executive Committee's (EC) recent approval of the latest Java SE 7 spec that finally became too much for the ASF membership to bear. "Oracle provided the EC with a Java SE 7 specification request and license that are self-contradictory, severely restrict distribution of independent implementations of the spec, and most importantly, prohibit the distribution of independent open source implementations of the spec," read a Dec. 9 post on the ASF's blog. "Oracle has refused to answer any reasonable and responsible questions from the EC regarding these problems."
The loss of the ASF is going to hurt, and Oracle knows it. Big O asked the ASF to reconsider its decision in another blog post: " Last month Oracle renominated Apache to the Java Executive Committee because we valued their active participation and perspective on Java..." Henrik Ståhl's Dec. 9 post read in part. "...We encourage Apache to reconsider its position and remain a part of the process to move Java forward. ASF and many open source projects within it are an important part of the overall Java ecosystem."
Oracle is right to want the ASF back in the JCP, says RedMonk analyst Michael Coté.
"The Apache Software Foundation has done a tremendous amount over the years to make the Java world a better place," Coté said. "The Web server (which is not Java), sure, but the vast array of projects that implement standards and the other libraries have brought millions, of not more, in revenue to the Java world: Struts, Tomcat, and so forth. And now, many of the important and interesting projects in the Java world are housed at the ASF -- Hadoop and Casandra to name two Big Data examples. Java developers and companies owe a lot to the ASF."
"If the ASF, its members, and the projects withdraw from participating in the official Java process," he added, "it'll push Java innovation further from the control of the standards bodies and its patrons. If more people take their toys and leave, as it were, the sanctioned Java world will have less fun toys to play with. I don't think that threatens Oracle, IBMs, SAP or any other member of the official Java world very much in the here and now. But, it does mean that some key innovators (not all) will seek new places to evolve Java. That could mean less control, ironically, for people like Oracle and more hassle when they want to catch-up with and incorporate those innovations if their customers start demanding them."
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, sees the loss of the ASF as bad news for the Java community, but also views Oracle's actions in general as positive for Java.
"There's no doubt in my mind that Apache has contributed enormously to the success of Java," Milinkovich said. "Geir Magnusson in particular, and others at Apache put a lot of effort into making the JCP a lot more open and a plausible process for open source. This is a sad event for the Java community."
"The good news," he added, "is that we now have a resolution to the dispute, and Oracle has made it clear that they are planning on investing in the Java platform and moving Java forward. I very much regret that Apache is unhappy with the way this went, though I don't disagree with their position. I might have had the same reaction myself were I in their shoes. But I am happy that Java is moving forward again. We have been stalled as a platform for far too long."
IDC analyst Al Hilwa sees old TCK dispute as the wrong reason to leave the JCP, especially now that IBM has turned away from Harmony, and he worries about how the infighting is going to affect the JCP.
"There is little support for Harmony," he says, "but Apache is a respected open source organization whose expertise would be helpful to the JCP -- assuming that the JCP functions effectively and smoothly and moves Java forward in a rapid fashion. If the JCP becomes a political body for the various players to grand-stand, then I am not sure it is performing a useful purpose. Java is in a competitive market of alternative languages and environments, and it must evolve and do so rapidly to continue to remain relevant."
Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments
The book as we know it is probably going the way of photo film and vinyl LPs: it won't disappear altogether, but evolve into an increasingly rarer curiosity treasured by aficionados. But whether it's an eText or dead-tree-tech, books still make great holiday gifts for the geeks in your life. Here, in no particular order, are a few that came across my desk this year that might be worthy of a place under your tree:
- Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley Professional, January 9, 2009.
We did a SuperCast with Lisa Crispin this year, and her presentation was very well received. Both XP guru Ron Jeffries and Uncle Bob Martin of Object Mentor have endorsed this excellent and much needed book.
- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, by Jez Humble and David Farley (Addison-Wesley Professional, August 6, 2010).
This timely book lays out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of new functionality to users. It covers such techniques as automated management, data migration, and the use of virtualization. This is a great book for anyone on a delivery team.
- Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook, by Michael Lopp (O'Reilly Media, July 27, 2010).
If you haven't heard of Lopp, it's probably because of his nom de blog. He's the "Rands" of Rands in Repose. The book is largely a collection of his best blog posts. Readers get a narrative covering a typical tech-job life span, from job interview to the move to greener pastures. (You might also check out Lopp's other book, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager.)
- 100 SOA Questions: Asked and Answered, by Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani (Prentice Hall, November 22, 2010).
This one is mainly for the business types in your life, but it might answer a question or two lingering in your mind about Service Oriented Architectures. Written by two IBMers, this book couldn't be more straightforward. It does exactly what it promises, taking on top-of-mind SOA questions such as: "Does SOA require service modeling?", "What are the building blocks of an SOA infrastructure?", and "What is the future trajectory of SOA?"
- Building the Perfect PC, by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson (O'Reilly Media, November 24, 2010).
Here's a gift for the Make magazine fans on your list. It might seem to be a book for quasi-technical geek wannabes, but this is a valuable how-to written by hardware experts. Include the URL to Mr. Thompson's Web page on the card.
I also want to recommend some oldies, but still goodies:
- Programming Clojure, by Stuart Halloway (Pragmatic Bookshelf, May 21, 2009).
- Eclipse Plug-ins, by Eric Clayberg, (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2008).
- Release It: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software, by Michael Nygard (Pragmatic Bookshelf, March 30, 2007).
- Software Security: Building Security In, by Gary McGraw (Addison-Wesley Professional, February 2, 2006).
And finally, a shameless, self-serving plug for my new book: The Everything Guide to Social Media (Adams Media, November 18, 2010). I'll let an Amazon reader speak for me on this one:
"If you're still unclear about the difference between Facebook and Twitter, this is the book for you. Well written, it provides a clear overview of the various social media tools available today. I'd especially recommend this for parents who are struggling to keep up with all the modes of communication and engagement being used by their kids online and for any professional or small business owner who needs to keep up with the changing landscape & harness social media tools for their own benefit."
Happy holidays!
Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments
Most of the time, reporting on doing ons in the Valley of Silicon is an inspiring gig filled with world-changing technological innovations and amazing success stories -- 26-year-old-billionaires, for example, making it to the cover of Time magazine. And sometimes it's like covering a bunch of fifth graders playing King if the Hill.
It's getting hard to keep up with who's suing whom around her. This week, it's Swiss mobile software maker Myriad Group suing Oracle for allegedly charging excessive licensing fees for Java.
Bloomberg.com reported on Monday that the Swiss company filed the suit on Dec. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, asking Oracle America for "at least" $120 million in restitution.
Myriad charges that Big O is failing to license its Java tech fairly to its industry partners -- Myriad, in particular -- and alleges that Oracle made them pay on "unfair, unreasonable and discriminatory royalty-based terms."
There's kind of a David-and-Goliath vibe to this dustup. Myriad, which uses a lot of Java in its mobile applications, reported about $105.3 million in revenue last year, while Oracle reported $26.8 billion in sales last fiscal year.
But Florian Mueller, the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who laid out the situation well in his Dec. 14 FOSS Patents blog, looked over the compaint and concluded that there is "clearly connected to the ongoing patent litigation between Oracle and Google and the wider conflict concerning Oracle's Java licensing policies in connection with mobile platforms."
"What we are seeing here," Mueller wrote, "is a phalanx formed against Oracle by Google, Apache and Myriad." The Myriad Group , it seems, is being advised by the law firm that is defending Google against Oracle.
It has also been reported that Scott Weingaertner, one of the attorneys representing Myriad in the lawsuit, is also representing Google in the patent infringement suit filed by Oracle against the search engine giant in August. Oracle alleges that Google infringed on seven Java Platform patents in its Android mobile operating system.
Of course, Oracle isn't the kind of company to stand there and get bitch-slapped. On the same day Myriad filed its suit, Oracle filed a complaint against Myriad in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the Swiss company failed to comply with its royalty obligations and that it is making unauthorized use of the Java trademark and logo.
I chatted with a couple of local industry watchers about the dueling lawsuits. Forrester analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond pointed out that Myriad is part of the Android community and a member of the Open Handset Alliance.
"I'm not surprised to see Oracle squeezing its Java ME licensees to the point where they cry uncle," Hammond told me in an e-mail. "I'm sure they will look to extract as much revenue as possible to recoup their investments in the acquisition."
Forrester analyst John R. Rymer noted that Myriad makes a version of Dalvik, the VM in the Android OS. The company recently unveiled Dalvik Turbo, a JVM designed to beat the execution speed of Google's version. Dalvik does not comply with the mainstream JVM.
"The lawsuit in essence accuses Google of hiring former Sun engineers and copying patented Sun technologies to build their own version of the technology without paying Oracle license fees," Rymer told me in an earlier interview. "I don't think the paying of license fees is under dispute; Google doesn't pay Oracle Java licensing fees. At issue is whether or not engineers working at Google and on Dalvik [the Android VM] could implement their own versions of class loaders and other critical Java IP without having to pay Oracle for the privilege."
Hammond and Rymer are working on an in-depth analysis of recent events. I'll give you a heads up when it's published. Meanwhile, check out Mueller's blog; it's one of the best summaries of the situation, and he's keeping it updated.
Posted by John K. Waters on December 17, 20101 comments