This is interesting in light of ongoing discussions about MPE's future.
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In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts Code in Public Domain
August 3, 2004
By STEVE LOHR
Correction Appended
I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is contributing more
than half a million lines of its software code, valued at
$85 million, to an open source software group.
The move is one of the largest transfers ever of
proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the
code contribution to try to help make it easier and more
appealing for software developers to write applications in
the Java programming language.
The I.B.M. step is a competitive tactic, to be sure. The
company is one of the leading supporters of the Java
technology, which was originally developed by Sun
Microsystems. The more Java applications that are written,
the more potential uses there are for I.B.M.'s software
platform that runs and manages those applications, known as
WebSphere.
I.B.M.'s WebSphere competes with Microsoft's software
platform for handling applications, called .Net. And
Microsoft has its own programming language, C#, which
competes with Java.
Other companies also offer Java-based software
environments, but Microsoft sees WebSphere as its main
rival. At a meeting with financial analysts last Thursday,
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, singled out WebSphere as
the leading challenger to .Net. "Over the next few years,
one of those will emerge as a better piece of software,"
Mr. Gates said.
I.B.M. is handing over the code for Cloudscape, a database
written in Java, to an open source group, the Apache
Software Foundation. Within the open source group, the
database will be called Derby.
The Apache organization is best known as the steward of the
Apache Web server, which is the software that powers most
Web sites, though it also oversees many open-source Java
projects. In the open source model of development, the code
is distributed free and programmers are free to modify and
debug it, within certain rules.
Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property
rights to the Cloudscape code. By transferring its
technology into the public domain, Janet Perna, general
manager for data management software at I.B.M., said, "We
hope to spur the further development of the Java
community."
Most business applications require some database functions
like storing and looking up price or customer information,
whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is
intended for use as a simple database that resides inside a
software application instead of as a full-fledged database
program that runs on its own in corporate data centers as
Oracle, I.B.M.'s DB/2, and Microsoft's SQL or MySQL do.
Placing software into the open source realm does not
guarantee that it will succeed in attracting programmers to
maintain and improve the code. Still, Java experts say that
there is a need for a basic Java database and that the
Cloudscape code could prove to be popular. "It is a nice,
out-of-the-box database," said Greg Stein, chairman of the
Apache Foundation.
The I.B.M. move, according to industry analysts, is further
evidence of its support for open source software. The
company has been a contributor of people, code and
marketing dollars to 150 open source projects. Its biggest
commitment has been to Linux, an open source operating
system that is an alternative to the operating systems of
two of I.B.M.'s leading rivals, Microsoft and Sun
Microsystems.
If freeing proprietary code will undermine competitors or
enlarge support for WebSphere, analysts say, I.B.M. is now
willing to do it. "The Cloudscape code is not a major
factor in I.B.M.'s overall platform strategy," said Mike
Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research, an Internet
marketing firm. "So this makes sense for I.B.M."
The $85 million value that I.B.M. placed on its code
contribution is the price Informix, a database company,
paid in 1999 for Cloudscape, a small start-up company. In
2001, I.B.M. acquired Informix for $1 billion.
Correction: August 4, 2004, Wednesday
A headline in
Business Day yesterday with an article about I.B.M.'s
decision to make some software code more widely available
to programmers referred imprecisely to its plans. While the
code will be contributed to an "open source" software
group, it will not be in the public domain. The group, the
Apache Software Foundation, will hold the licensing and
intellectual-property rights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/technology/03java.html?ex=1092648210&ei=1&en=a56645d2c75c7f1c
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
--
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
130 S. 1st Street, Suite 220
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1343
http://www.northtech.com/
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