Lonnie Knows Everything

Apple is proprietary. Apple doesn’t like open source.

That’s fine by me. Apple is not a monopoly. As far as I’m concerned they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Android proves that every day.

But there is proprietary and there is proprietary. There is the proprietary that says, I can decide how my gear displays stuff, so Flash won’t. There is the proprietary that says I will control what my device will do, and it won’t do porn.

And there’s the proprietary that says you can only build stuff to run on my gear with my tools.

That is what programmers who use Appcelerator’s Titanium are wondering right now. And if Jobs insists on controlling the tools used to code for his hardware, I think he’s shooting himself in a far more vital place.

At the end of the day, whether you’re writing in Objective C or Javascript, all your code gets turned into 1s and 0s, and all 1s and 0s are created equal. An iPad can’t tell that a programmer originally used Javascript, so long as the code is translated into something the machine understands, Objective C, which Titanium does.

Since its introduction in 2008 Titanium has become an important competitor to Adobe AIR. If Jobs hates Adobe, the enemy of his enemy should be a friend.

So far Appcelerator, which was formed in Atlanta but then moved to Mountain View, is keeping pretty quiet about the issue. Its latest news release notes only that it supports a lot of developers, and is getting more all the time.

But there is a message there for Jobs. Developers can learn a lot of different languages, but most don’t want to. It’s much easier for them to become comfortable with a few tools or programming environments. This makes them more productive.

Appcelerator notes that this makes it popular. Programmers can use whatever system they want to program for whatever target they want. The code is open source, but that’s not the point my friend. The point is programmer comfort.

If forced to choose between comfort and market share, moreover, there’s always Android. Despite its growth and hype Apple iPhones and iPads still represent a small portion of Internet traffic, and the Android platform is now growing faster.

If Jobs has better tools for creating apps, let him compete for programmers’ loyalty. Dictating to them in this way risks the consumer market share already gained, because consumers don’t care about programming tools, only about their own experience.

And if they can get just as good an experience with an Android, plus more apps because programmers prefer other tools to those of Apple, well, the Macintosh was better than PCs in the 1980s, too.

There is a limit to how far a vendor can push a market. Steve Jobs has pushed too hard before. Appcelerator could be the turning point ending the second age of Apple.

Or not.

Red Hat has been doing the dog-and-pony this week, and by accepting the criticism of open source licensing gotten the rest of the industry into a bad odor.

Why aren’t there any $1 billion open source companies, asked Glyn Moody. Strange criticism, given that Red Hat is now worth nearly $6 billion.

Of course, you then note, he must be talking about sales. It’s true, Red Hat’s run rate is still short of the mark at about $800 million. It’s close to that of Novell in that regard. And I haven’t even mentioned Ubuntu and Canonical yet. (OK, now I did.)

On the other hand it’s also possible that Moody’s definition of “an open source company” is too narrow. He seems to think that you’re only an open source company if all you do is sell support for open source products, and we should only count that revenue.

When you put it that way Red Hat’s success becomes even more remarkable. No one has to pay an open source software company for its code. If a pure open source company is only one that depends on voluntary code payments for its bread, then getting $800 million of such payments a year is pretty amazing.

There may never be another Red Hat, a company that grows organically out of Linux support contracts, quietly building billions in value thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. So what?

Open source is still a raging success, and not just for customers who have seen costs slashed, or brought inside, by the availability of free online code.

IBM, for instance, rationalized what a decade ago was an incompatible collection of hardware and business units around open source software. Linux now runs on all kinds of IBM hardware, open source tools drive its service business. Do I have to mention how much money it’s worth or what its sales figures are?

Google is not the only SaaS outfit driven by open source. There are dozens, some of which are vertical, others horizontal in nature. Google’s open source Android design may have saved Motorola, to cite one example.

I suppose none of that counts, because IBM and Google and Motorola aren’t relying entirely on voluntary payments of support for their code. They do other things.

But so what? The success and importance of open source should not be measured entirely by Red Hat, even though Red Hat is a great example of what’s possible.

The billions saved by customers, the hundreds of thousands of jobs created for developers working on open source code, the hardware and service revenues made possible by open source, these count, too.

Open source is one of the great, continuing success stories of our time because there are many different ways to skin the open source cat. You can put it under your Red Hat or use it as an ingredient in many other business models, models that succeed on the bottom line. There are still more such models to be discovered.

If that’s failure, give me more failures like it.

Eucalyptus Systems — with former mySQL CEO Marten Mickos now at the helm — is readying for battle with VMware.

On Wednesday, the open source company will announce a major upgrade of its private cloud software that offers, for the first time, support for Windows images — a necessity for any company targeting enterprise customers.

Version 2.0 of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is “more scalable, has features we didn’t have before and now hosts Windows images. You can run Windows applications on Eucalyptus, a major new opening for new use cases than before,” said Mickos, who took over as Eucalyptus’ CEO last March. “It’s obvious [you] need to do it at some point. We supported Linux and now there is support for Windows.”

Mickos noted that Eucalyptus is preparing for its first real competition with the release of VMware’s vCloud later this year. Yet, he is in no mood to pick a fight with a business partner and a rival that he says will end up generating more business for his latest enterprise.

“I have no doubt they will be successful in the market … but the market is very large,” he said, noting that VMware is one of Eucalyptus’ virtualization partners. He also said Eucalyptus’ open source model and support for Amazon’s APIs (and multiple virtualization hypervisors) gives it appeal to customers that prefer standards.

Yet Mickos himself emphasized that the infrastructure-as-a-service software category is in its infancy. Unlike software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Eucalyptus offers software that allows enterprises to launch their own private clouds — which allows them to harness all of their compute power and hardware assets and quickly provision applications and services.

Mickos, who sold mySQL to Sun for $1 billion, knows how to take an open source company from obscurity to the top of the commercial world. Still, Eucalyptus is pioneering a new category of software, he emphasizes.

“Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new …. mySQL came out with a product that was a known quantity. People knew what a relational database was,” he noted. “We were David versus Goliath but cloud computing is new and we’re the first vendor with a cloud computing platform available. We are the ones setting the standards.”

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Apple may want to think twice before banning Appcelerator Titanium as a tool for building iPhone and iPad apps, vice president of marketing Scott Schwarzhoff told ZDNet Open Source.

Titanium is good enough, it works well enough, and by gosh, developers like it for building apps.

“I can’t speak to the prospects of being banned. Since this started in April over 1,000 apps have been approved.” By “this” Schwarzhoff means Apple’s jihad against Adobe Flash, and by extension against third-party tools used to build what goes on its hardware.

Back then CEO (and former Atlantan) Jeff Haynie wrote that Titanium was fully in compliance with the Apple terms of service “as we interpret them.” Schwarzhoff said there are now over 50,000 Titanium developers producing 100 new apps for the Apple platform every three days. And those apps are being approved.

“Our position on how we work with Apple or any OS platform” is the same, he said. “We only communicate with documented APIs, we compile everything down to native code, and we follow the entire Xcode tool chain.”

The only thing Schwarzhoff can’t give is a confirmation from Apple that open source Appcelerator is A-OK with them.

Besides, there are other mobile platforms. Android developers like Titanium. So do those working with Microsoft. And Appcelerator will have full support for the RIM Blackberry by fall. “We talk to them all the time,” Schwarzhoff said.

Appcelerator presently has a survey of its developers in the field and more will be known on their feelings by Wednesday. Meanwhile, they’ll take Jobs’ no comment as a yes.

With little news happening on the beat this morning (Google offering a command line interface) I started thinking about open source as an attitude.

While we usually think of open source as a development model or a business model, it is also, very much, an attitude. It’s a counterweight to the “not invented here” syndrome we find in most of industry.

The oil industry is an example. Oil technology is dominated by a small and shrinking list of companies. All are large bureaucracies. All are attuned to a single mindset on the part of their customers.

As a result, we have learned, oil technology has barely changed in a generation. The same techniques that tried, and failed, to stop an undersea leak 30 years ago are being tried now, only in deeper water. And they’re not working.

Liberals want to chalk this up to a lack of investment, a willful blindness to risk. But it’s also a form of groupthink, a narrowing of vision caused by a shrinking pool of competitors.

The OTS Model 10 shown, from Kevin Costner’s Ocean Therapy Solutions, is a very simple device. It’s a centrifuge. A combination of oil and water flows into it, it’s thrown by centrifugal force, and this separates the two.

Yet for nearly 20 years Costner has been the oil industry’s Flying Dutchman, wandering the world with this solution, unable to land, because no one would even acknowledge the problem. Observers still wonder whether BP is serious about using it or is just engaging in PR by signing a letter of intent with the company,

Part of this had to do with Costner’s celebrity, but most had to do with his outsider status. Had Cameron or Halliburton come up with this device, they might have sought changes in maritime law to consider leaked oil salvage, which it in fact is.

We can still make those changes. The BP disaster has uncovered many opportunities for legal and regulatory changes which need to be made. Yet some in the industry are now calling this a “natural disaster.” It’s not. It’s completely man-made.

I don’t want to make a political point here. Groupthink can happen in any industry, or in any government. Eyes can be closed to opportunity, the attitude being that if we didn’t think of it the idea can’t be any good.

People in technology have learned the danger in this attitude.

It may be hard for many readers to conceive of just how wedded to its own ideas IBM was 20 years ago, just how resistant it was to concepts it had not created. The attitude brought the company to the verge of collapse.

Today’s IBM is very different. Open source, collaboration, coopitition — all these concepts have resonance far beyond software.

I began my journalism career in Houston, and I sometimes see that city’s industry now as being very much where IBM itself was 20 years ago. IBM needed to be shaken to their core in order to accept the necessity of change. The same is true here.

It’s a tiny silver lining in a very dark cloud, but maybe it can grow into something bigger, if it sparks an open source attitude in the oilpatch.