Can VMWare stay closed while buying open?
Summary: SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin expects VMWare to make more applications in the open source space, calling it "squarely in the open source camp." But is it in that camp as camper, or is it acting as a predator?
Much of the agonizing over Oracle's purchase of Sun (and mySQL) lies in the fact that Oracle is a closed-source, proprietary company.
This fact has split the open source industry from the open source community. The industry loves this trend, especially that part funded by venture capital. The community is troubled. They smell a bait-and-switch.
But there's another, related story that either proves the need for concern or offers a third way for a marriage of commercial and open source products. VMware.
Under former Microsoftie Paul Maritz (above), VMWare has been "moving aggressively up the stack," in SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin's words, by buying open source companies. First it bought SpringSource, a well-managed Java middleware outfit. Now it has bought Zimbra, the collaboration software company previously owned by Yahoo.
But this does not make VMWare an open source company. As its open source policy states, VMWare does release some components of its software as open source, but it doesn't support them. Instead it sells commercial alternatives.
Before flaming Maritz and VMWare, understand that it has a cloud-based services strategy. It's pushing its own virtualization software with open source applications as a complete cloud stack. It can sell this as a product, as software, or it can run its own cloud.
While this strategy makes legitimate use of open source components, it's not an open source strategy. Augustin expects VMWare to make more applications in the open source space, calling it "squarely in the open source camp."
But is it in that camp as camper, or is it acting as a predator? You tell me.
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
How do I make contact with these guys
At TurboCASH Accounting we have both Cloud and Desktop apps. We are in a key market - SME Accounting. There simply are no other Open Source accounting projects with our scope of footprint. What we need is an uncle in the Corporate business that will help us stand up in one of the most vicious markets in the software business. We compete against Sage and Intuit. Surely we can be of assistance to VMWare?
We have over 100 000 active users in 80 countries using our products in 25 languages. Do you HAVE to be a US based comnpany to get attention around here?
Oh.. sure...
Sure.. the only guys on the block.. unless of course you count Compiere, xTuple, or OpenPro..
TurboCASH is, indeed, in a league of its own in one respect - it has reached a new low for completely useless supporting website.. Perhaps the rather confusing an unprofessional-looking website that you've got representing your product is creating the wrong impression to the VMWare folks?
VMware is a predator...
Since VMware's product "stack" is proprietary they aren't an open source company period...no more than Oracle is an open source company.
By comparison Novell is a good example of a hybrid open source and proprietary software company. Novell is open source with their Linux stack and some of their services like Mono, iFolder and Kablink (Novell Teaming). Novell employees are contributors and maintainers on a number of open source projects, including OpenOffice.org.
In my estimation, VMware has a monopoly in the server virtualization market and will do whatever is legal to maintain that monopoly. They don't cooperate with any of the other virtualization vendors to any great degree. They don't think they have to. I put them in the predator category...not to be trusted by the open source community.
Tim Wessels
Do they have to be an open-source company?
I agree - VMWare has some "Free" products, but none of them are open-source, and I really doubt that you'd see any open-source technology coming from VMWare so long as everyone else is playing "catch-up" from a technological point of view. They've had a pretty large head-start.
"By comparison Novell is a good example of a hybrid open source and proprietary software company. Novell is open source with their Linux stack and some of their services like Mono, iFolder and Kablink (Novell Teaming). Novell employees are contributors and maintainers on a number of open source projects, including OpenOffice.org."
I would hope that there were better examples of "good" open-source/proprietary companies than Novell or Sun.. Both merely shells of their former selves, begging to be swallowed by larger companies or fading into obscurity.
"In my estimation, VMware has a monopoly in the server virtualization market and will do whatever is legal to maintain that monopoly."
Wow.. you throw around the "M" word like you know what it means.. Large market share - yes, monopoly - not even close..
A few years ago, you could argue (tenuously) they were a "monopoly", simply because nobody else was really making a viable competing product (just like the iPod was a monopoly in 2003).. Of course, that would make them a natural monopoly of a very small, specialized market.. Now with Parallels, Sun, Microsoft, and Citrix all jumping into the mix, (the latter three offering free alternatives), there is plenty of competition for VMWare to worry about. They aren't in a position where they could exercise anything even remotely resembling monopoly power anymore.
One thing about virtualization software, there is an extremely low switching cost, compared to other enterprise software.. I can even take a virtual machine created for VMWare and run it on either VirtualBox or Hyper-V without really changing anything..
"They don't cooperate with any of the other virtualization vendors to any great degree. They don't think they have to. I put them in the predator category...not to be trusted by the open source community."
Well.. no.. I don't see why VMWare should have to "cooperate" with their competitors any more than would be to the benefit of VMWare.. Silicon Valley might be in California, but that doesn't automatically make it the land of the hippy love-fest for technology companies.. And besides, I haven't seen a lot of cases where vendors cooperating with each other instead of competing with each other has really been of benefit to users.. I personally like to see many companies fight for my dollar, rather than just agree on how they're going to split it.
VMWare will rightly do what's best for VMWare, if the Open Source community can prove to be as good at innovating as its most vocal proponents claim it to be, VMWare will continue to support the Open Source project as a means to improve on the software and extend their own offerings at little risk or expense.. If it turns out that the most innovation comes from within VMWare itself, then why should the Open Source community be appalled or surprised if they release a commercial version of the software and exclude their improvements from the open-source version?
RE: Can VMWare stay closed while buying open?
RE: Can VMWare stay closed while buying open?
RE: Can VMWare stay closed while buying open?
@Phillip Copeman
Yea, they've made several variations on Open Source Software licencing recently. One of which was to allow OSS in proprietary software. Before, if you included an OSS component, you had to release the end result as OSS, otherwise you'd be stealing the software. Now, you can release it under certain conditions varying on license.
Nothing new here...
This isn't a recent variation at all.. In fact, it predates the GPL (the most widely used "contribute-back" style of Open Source license)..
Having said this, it wouldn't matter if the software were covered by the GPL or any other open-source license, anyway. The Copyright owner is not subject to the terms of the license, so they would have the right to modify it as they see fit and release it as a fully closed commercial product.