Expect More Troll-like Behavior

Oracle recently sued Google for patent and copyright infringement. The full text of the complaint is available here. I agree with Miguel De Icaza in that this will most likely result in a settlement out of court.

Sun’s weaker position, and its alliance with the Open Source community, did not allow it to sue Google for patent infringement. This is all covered in depth in this CNET article. Given Sun’s massive patent portfolio, and Oracle’s need to monetize their acquisition, the lawsuit is not surprising.

Oracle’s behavior seems troll-like. It is also seems unabashedly capitalist. Big companies that act like trolls have a tendency to be countersued. Chances are, others can find a patent or two that the bigger company has run afoul of. The question is, why is a large company like Oracle going after a large company like Google, besides the money? Oracle has much to lose in this case. In addition, it is not clear that they have all that much to gain either.

As Eben Moglen pointed out at his recent Linuxcon keynote “The patent system is built for secrecy and for trouble-making — it’s not a pro-innovation system.” Patent trolls and those that sue for patent infringement usually are not creating any value. This is a reason that the Open Source community, people who create value for the common good, finds this behavior so reprehensible.

A lot of enterprise software companies are sitting on a lot of cash. Investment opportunities are not good as a few years ago. Consequently, for companies that have not donated their patents to cross-licensing organizations (such as OIN), it makes sense to extract as much value as possible out of their patent portfolio. Also, it has the benefit of helping companies to build out their cash stockpiles, suppress competition and stifle innovation.

Larry Ellison and Sun

There is a special report available via ABC which is really an in-depth post-mortem of the Sun deal.

In recent years, Sun outsourced much of its sales, counting on resellers to promote its products. That’s anathema at Oracle, which employs 22,000 salespeople and 11,000 software consultants who work directly with its largest customers. … “Astonishingly they laid off all the sales people and they laid off all the field service people. They just got rid of them all,” he said. “Guess what? Sales dropped. It’s breathtaking!”

I am not going to mention what company this reminds me of. I will mention that the quote is from Larry Ellison. I think this article is required reading for anyone in the enterprise IT market.

Value Of Open Source

There is a good article on Reuters where Monty Widenius talks about Oracle and MySQL. There is a quote that caught my attention:

Widenius said that while the code could be easily copied, the main problem was the ecosystem around MySQL — companies making business from it, developing it and using it. “If it would be easy to fork (copy) it, no-one would have paid a billion dollars for it.”

It isn’t a revolutionary concept. However, it illustrates the point that the real value of Open Source projects is not the code, but the community and ecosystem around the project. Growing the community and eco-system should be the primary function of a company that “owns” an open source project, since that is where the long-term value is. This in turn drives adoption and revenues.

No MySQL Spinoff

Computerworld is reporting that Larry Ellison and Oracle won’t spin-off MySQL.

“No, we’re not going to spin it off,” even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. The EU is concerned about Oracle simultaneously owning MySQL, the leading open source database, and its own Oracle enterprise commercial database.

What I found to be even more interesting is the way he is dismissing Cloud Computing. In a time where many companies are embracing the cloud, and management thereof, Ellison is focused on the basics – databases, operating systems and hardware.

“Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it’s the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud,” he said. The cloud still requires components such as databases, operating systems, and memory, said Ellison. He pointed out the seeming absurdity in which cloud computing previously was called the Internet, software as a service, and on-demand computing.

He seems to be embracing almost all aspects of the Sun acquisition, including flash storage.