Oracle hosted a “fire-side” chat about Java this past Tuesday, giving an update on how the community is doing and taking a few questions. John Waters sent a few questions over for a piece published as “Oracle Speaks Out on Java, One Year Later…Sort Of.” Here’s the complete answers I wrote up:

Q: Are user groups the heart and soul of the Java community? Do they have this right? Is this a good strategy?

Java user groups may not be as powerful as they used to, at least in the US, 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. I don’t know figures on user groups, but anecdotal, I tend to see them still well attended. There’s fragmentation and interest in other platforms and groups as well, but Java User Groups certainly aren’t dead-wood floating up on the beach.

The Java community has many hearts and souls, of course. But, if you were to pick one community, it’d be hard to go wrong with user groups. The only issue is that you might be missing out on some of the edge cases and emerging Java developers who aren’t interested in only the Java world. There’s probably some Dalvik, Android, and other mobile developers that the overall Java community should be looking towards, and also many of the new database types (broadly, “NoSQL”) and app platforms are Java-based, but are far from “official” Java. A recent post from Stephen O’Grady outlined this “mutation” well.

Q: What do you think of that idea of Big banks and telcos being brought in to the JCP to represent “the user”?

That makes perfect sense if you want to promote the use of established “users.” 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 and, further, that it’s actually a good idea to give big spending users like that “a seat at the table.”

Now, the problem with that is that you want to balance that out with important innovations coming from community members with “shallow pockets.” So called “community” people like to complain about monied interested invading the “community” as if big banks and telcos aren’t part of that community [NOTE: I accidentally omitted that magical "if" in my reply to John so it's not reflected in John's piece, which changes the point I'm saying here a bit, obviously] . I think what they’re really worried about is not excluding these people (“big companies”), but about 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.

People seem to want JavaOne to be it’s own conference…

Yeah, JavaOne used to be the event for Java developers, and a significant one for the development world in general (we’ve seen Google I/O rising an interesting, if narrow replacement, kindasorta). 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 it’s own conference, if only in name.

Last week, Jack Clark of ZDNet UK asked me about Rackspace’s OpenStack project, who has an upcoming community meeting in Austin (which, sadly, I’ll be out of town for). Form our email “conversation,” here’s his questions and my answers:

Q: The release notes show greater compatibility for security group protocols used in Eucalyptus and AWS – how important are steps like this for increasing portability?

A: Ideally, different cloud platforms would be very compatible with each other, and you could just move applications around willy-nilly. This kind of thing doesn’t really exist in the non-cloud world, where application dependencies between operating systems and various patch levels are normal. Being pragmatic, you’d at least hope that cloud platforms would one day be as interoperable as different Linux distributions: requiring some tweaking to move from distro to distro, but not major rework, if the application was written with moving around in mind. For OpenStack (or any would be public cloud platform), making migrations from Amazon easy is key as that’s where the bulk of current cloud users are that you’d want to poach. More generally, if there’s a lower-level, architectural concept like security groups that’s finding success in the cloud world, it’s probably wise to implement it instead of coming up with your own ideas that developers will have to learn afresh.

 

Q: How significant is OpenStack to the cloud ecosystem, given its partner program and core technology?

A: At the moment, there’s high hopes around OpenStack from many people in the cloud ecosystem. Aside from Rackspace themselves, there are not big instances of using OpenStack (that I know of), but that’s because OpenStack as a “cloud in a box” platform is still a work in progress, requiring the deployer to customize it to their setup. (As an aside: the idea of an “instant cloud” is itself a bit far-fetched as setting up the servers, networking, storage, and data center infrastructure needed are far from “instant.”) Rackspace’s goal in releasing early was to get fuller involvement from the resulting community, which looks to be working from the interest I’ve seen from various partners and potential project contributors. Most people working in the cloud space, nascent as it is, are very interested in OpenStack, and the list of people (and companies they represent) going to the upcoming design summit proves this.

Interested in more on OpenStack? Check out my Brief Note from July and an interview with Rackspace’s Jonathan Bryce from the initial release.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a client.

John K. Waters had several questions about the cracks du jour in the until recently sleepy and happy Java community:

What’s up with the JCP?

First, John asked about Doug Lea leaving the JCP, to which I replied:

I don’t know Doug Lea personally, or professionally really. While I haven’t spoken with Oracle on the topic, they do seem to be changing how the Java community is being run, making sure to control as much of it as possible. Really, I don’t know why we’d expect less: Sun tried to exert control (and in befuddling the ASF around TCK and “field of use” fine-print tactics acted like a pretty poor community overlord, despite the massive goodness that came from other efforts like OpenJDK), and Oracle spent a lot of money buying JAVA.

Oracle’s business model is to buy large, successful cash cows and milk revenue from them as much as possible, and what you’re seeing around their mum approach to the Java community aligns with that. More than likely, they’ll only get “involved” when the ROI can be quantified (a number that can put in a spreadsheet cell), not just when it’s a “good thing” or several steps removed from revenue generation. Sun’s business practices around open source were somewhat the opposite, which didn’t work out well for them in the long run at a corporate level. So you can imagine the new owner of JAVA feel justified in changing the way it operates.

What that means is that Oracle would (I’m guessing) like to see the Java community become more commercial, rather than “academic.” In contemporary standards bodies like the JCP, this means emphasizing the business value of a standard or effort, even at the Java SE level, meaning people like Doug Lea, as he explained very well in his letter, don’t really have a place in the JCP. It also means standards body knife-fighting and “back-room” politicking which is probably odious to most “open” minded people.

It’s like all those reality TV shows where everyone says one thing: “I’m here to win, not make friends.” Hopefully Oracle’ll listen to the gentle nudging in the community to win by making friends instead of ignoring them.

Apple Dumps Java

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.

–Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3 and 10.5 Update 8 Release Notes

John then asked about Apple’s decision to “deprecate” Java on OS X, that is, stop working on the Java runtime they’ve been delivering for years now.

Again, not having spoken with Apple on it, I just have pure speculation.

Apple has become the massively valued company it is by building a closed stack under its control. Consumers so far seem to love them for it. Java is outside of their control and consumes resources to get “perfect” enough to run on OS X.

The desktop hasn’t been a top strategy for Apple, iPods and then iPhones and now iPads being the chief strategy. But, with their new interest, it seems, in growing Mac desktop market-share and, more importantly, their ambitions to replication the iTunes App Store on the desktop, logic would dictate that Apple needs to lock down desktop development more. My theory is that Apple sees the Mac App Store as good bet for more revenues (more from selling more hardware than that cut of app sales, as with iOS devices), and wants to control as much of that stack as possible. Java is way out of their control, so under that strategy it’s got to go.

It’s also a wicked way to cause trouble to other ISVs. While Java on the desktop may not be used for a huge amount of desktop applications on OS X, it is used to back most of the development tools, esp. Eclipse. Developers have flocked to the Mac as a their primary computer and development machine. Without a good, frequently updated Java runtime on the Mac, all those developers will be in trouble. To play the grandpa role, back when I still wrote software, even when there was official Java support from Apple, the lagging release cycle meant Java developers on the Mac were always several months behind – it was crappy.

It’s not really that dire just yet, but it’s certainly annoying for developers and the companies putting out Java-based developer tools who’ll have to use other methods than the (now dead) “official” process for getting Java. It creates a great opportunity for someone to come in and play good cop to Apple’s jerk-move here, as strategic as it may be viz. the Mac App Store.

Disclosure: The Eclipse Foundation is a client, as is the Apache Software Foundation and other people who care about the Java world.

The telco ecosystem is finally waking up to Microsoft’s great epiphany of the 80′s and 90′s: it’s all about developers.

I was reminded of this when one of my high school alums Tweetered me about Motorola buying 280 North, makes of Cappuciono, an Object-C inspired app framework.

While I can’t say I’ve really every heard of anyone wanting to do more Object-C (like) coding, it highlights the fire under the collective back-sides of handset makers, carriers, and others in the telco space who’re seeing the developer ecosystems around Apple and Android disrupting their billion dollar revenue streams.

“…well I am now!”

Every technology need a parade of “killer features” to drive customers and for decades voice is what telcos offered. Remember all the “you can hear a pin drop” ads? While I might yell out “Bula Vinaka, Beachside!” each time AT&T drops my iPhone call, voice isn’t much of a killer feature anymore. There’s texting, of course, which while heavily used, is quickly becoming another undifferentiated feature (read: difficult to make easy money from in the face of cut-throat pricing from competition).

The App Economy

“Apps” are where it’s at now. Thanks to several years of advertising from Apple around the iPhone and the follow-on of Android, consumers are expecting their cellphones to be small computers. Just as with traditional computers, the availability of applications – killer apps – drives interest and buying behavior of the platform, here, various “smart phones” – soon just be “phones.”

Little wonder, then, that you’d see people like Motorola buying their way into application development. There’s a long way to go to build up a healthy and effective developer relations program, but having the actual technology – along with the talent and brand – is the necessary start. The existing cultures are a tremendous hurdle – the corporate structures are not really built around the slippery-slidey world of software and existing revenues are so stupidly massive that it’s easy to have a “what, me worry?” mentality.

Telco arms-dealers like Alcatel-Lucent are working on their own platform, and I’d expect to see more telco ecosystem folks – handset manufactures, telcos, equipment vendors, etc. – try to buy their way into, well, software.

Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent is a client.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they’re yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Rise of Community Marketing

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Sara Dornsife, self-professed Community Marketing Geek.

With a title like that, I ask Sara to tell us about a recent blog entry of hers describing the bloating of the marketing role as represented by job postings: doing traditional marketing and comms, community management, open source, events, and everything else. Sara says this is probably due to consolidation in jobs, companies cutting back and combining jobs together.

What Community Marketing Does

Blindly feeling out the elephant more, I ask Sara to tell us about the day-to-day activities of Community Marketing. It centers around “scaling up” community interactions; that is, figuring out moving beyond one-on-one interactions in the community of users for a product, service, etc. We compare these efforts to traditional marketing and advertising tacticts, where broadcast mediums seem to be of lessoning effectiveness.

Open Source Lessons Learned

Earlier that morning, Sara and I had both been on the SXSW panel, “Lessons Learned from Open Source.” We discuss what we discussed in that panel: namely, that open source a business model, on it’s own, isn’t too whiz-bang beyond acquisition exists. Zane asks if and how open source is used for marketing value.

We further discuss open source as a business model: my quip that you make money off open source by selling closed source; the troubling paradox of software quality and selling support; open source driving down costs & commodifying “over-priced” markets.

Doing a barcamp

Switching to conferences and events, since Sara was one of the main organizers for barcampAustin, I ask her what goes into unconferences like barcampAustin. “Not a lot of sleep,” she says. To hear Sara tell it, most of the work was done in the 8 days prior to the event, including booking Paradox (“18 and up welcome!”), rounding up sponsors, and more.

Picking the venue drives much of the format: the number of rooms you have in your venue determines how many sessions you can have at once, which, of course, determines how many sessions you have. The costs are low because people volunteer and sponsors donate all sorts of drinks and burritos. Sara estimates that barcampAustin was at about $25,000 for a 24 hour event.

Why do a barcamp?

The question, then, is why do this? For Sara, this is the kind of event she would be arranging in her role as Community Marketer, not to mention that she likes the local barcamp guy, whurley, and simply enjoys putting together and attending the event.

I ask her how she’d sell barcamps to corporations. The pay-back, for the cheap price, is a bucket of whuffie (good will and social capital) and an audience that’s more passionate than passive. The lack of “the corporate smell,” Sara says, brings higher quality attendees.

Today’s debriefing podcast (download here or subscribe to the feed) mentioned: my quick take on Microsoft and Nokia using jQuery, a brief note on seeing LogLogic’s new community portal and some basic tips on boot-strapping such sites, Hyperic’s HQ 4.0 Beta (with lengthy commentary on IT management agents behind the firewall and JMX browsing and monitoring), cubicles vs. offices, and then a brief mention of a piece on capacity management for cloud computing that I sent off to SearchDataCenter.com today.

(There’s a weird skip in the audio right at the beginning: don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything.)

Disclosure: Hyperic and Loglogic are clients.

While at SAP TechEd 2008 this week, I grabbed Craig Cmehil for a quick overview of what’s been going on the SAP Community over the past year. He tells us about:

• The evolution of the SDN Club House, a separate room set aside at TechEd for people to meet, hang out in, and get good coffee
• The rising interest in using RIA in SAP-land, diving into some quick examples of what people are using it for beyond charts and graphs
• The Process First book
• How the SDN point program is used to donate money to the UN

Disclosure: SAP is a client and paid for my travel and hotel to SAP TechEd this year.

The term “more heads are better than one” has a dicey applicability in IT management. As with most technological problems, too many cooks in the kitchen can make the problem worse. Yet, seeking assistance outside of one’s own head and team has long been a hallmark of how the IT department does its job. It’s easy to forget our pre-web lives when USEnet was a hot-bed for rough-made collaboration in posts along the lines of “how do I fix this problem? Error messages below…” Before that, we can assume there was only darkness: using the phone or actually talking to people face-to-face!

Joking aside, we’ve come a long way since even the days of Googling with error codes. Here, we’ll consider what some vendors and services are doing to move beyond the usual methods of collaborative IT management.

The emerging methods can be grouped into two categories: sharing configuration and group problem solving. Both enable collaboration beyond the firewall, pulling in help from outside of the datacenter payroll.

More…

It’s a short piece, so I don’t dive too much into specific examples, but there’s some call outs to Splunk, Paglo, Spiceworks, and FiveRuns.

Disclosure: Splunk, Spiceworks, and FiveRuns are client.

Over the weekend, I finally picked up an iPhone for myself thanks to my lovely wife who woke up and, no crap, said first thing “when does your Verizon contract end?”

She’s obsessed with the thing.

Small Change for Small Applications

When it comes to making money with software, the iPhone App Store is the glossiest example of trend I feel creeping up on us: people paying for software.

Yes, people have been paying for software forever, but the expectations for most consumer software of late has been that it’s free. GMail, YouTube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and IM. And there’s the encroachment on Microsoft Office from Google Docs, ZoHo, Adobe Buzzword, and others.

This is great for consumers, assuming that they “pay” for the software in other ways – looking for ads or helping the company in question stock up on eye-balls and the potential for a cash-out.

Developers, on the other hand, have had a tough time of it. If “everything” has to be free, it’s hard to boot-strap a company without the capital to burn while you’re “figuring out” your business model.

Looking at things like the App Store, Facebook apps, Ning, Bungee Labs, Force.com, and other (pretty much) SaaS-based platforms for small application developing, it’s seeming like the idea of getting paid up-front for software is starting to cook again. The excitement here, for developers, is being able to tap into an immediate revenue stream for products, for software. The alternative is usually consulting and services which distracts from building the software.

As we’ve noted in the past, the current round of platforms here are typically much more locked-up – closed – than we expect in the “freerer” world. My feeling is that the trade off is finding the sweet-spot between lock-in tolerance and fast revenue: the faster you can make more revenue, the more lock-in you’ll accept.

What’s Changed?

The change here is an environment where people will spend $0.99 to $20 for a piece of software. I often comment that this user-mentality – spending small amounts of cash on software – exists in the OS X world, but it’s been lacking from others.

Things like the App Store could start to chip away at a user’s concept that they can “pay” for software in non-cash ways. SaaS people like SalesForce and even Google Apps $50/year work to chip away at that user-spend mentality as well. Ultimately, the SaaS angle could accelerate this move away from free even more than Apple. (Search-and-replace SaaS->Cloud if you need to be buzzworded.)

Indeed, running and/or distributing software over the web seems to be one of the blockers removed. Part of the benefit is transforming your (the one selling software) sales organization to be primarily web based and understanding how you go all SEO-crazy and beyond to insert offers to buy into the life of your potential customer/user as much as possible. You take your sales force off the green and out of the steak-houses and put them on the web and in social networks. People like Solarwinds (soon to IPO, no less) and Spiceworks (400,000 users and growing) lead on this kind of thinking.

I don’t think it’s a sure change now in the user’s mind, but I think it’s close.

Servicing the Marketplace

For vendors, the chance is to provide the monetization platforms to these developers. The vendors benefit is not only take a cut of the sales, but also attracting the developers to their world.

It sounds “obvious,” but in the open source/everything is free world we’re in now, using “you can make money quickly” as a developer ecosystem feature/benefit isn’t actually as clear-cut as those developers with bills would like.

Take Adobe, for instance, fresh on my mind from the Analyst Summit last week. Currently, Adobe wants to fill out its RIA developer ranks. There are several ways to do this: pull in the existing Flash world, poach/share Java developers, bring in web/LAMP developers, etc.

Even more compelling for developers than “has good interfaces” and “can make sexy charts” that Adobe RIA currently uses would “makes me money quickly.” Here, the idea is to rig-up a platform for allowing developers to sell the RIAs they develop – the back-office, distribution, and sales/advertising (see web-based sales notions above) for that.

Being an “Adobe programmer” would not only mean nice looking charts, but it’d mean being able to get money quickly from software.

Adobe is just one example, of course. Any outfit could for for that: like Sun with Zembly.

Disclosure: Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft are clients. And thanks to Charles for the term “lock-in tolerance.”

While at RSDC ’08, I had the chance to talk with IBM’s Laura Bennett, Manager of the alphaWorks Team. I start out by asking her to explain what alphaWorks does, the life-cycle of projects that go through it, and what new projects and services we’ll be seeing from alphaWorks soon.

We then talk about developerWorks briefly, mostly focusing on how upcoming social networking features will help users find other users who can help them out, filter the available content, and also hook them up closer to IBMers and other community members.

Also, check out this CNet interview with Laura for some more details on the upcoming features and projects we talked about.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, paid for T&E to RSDC, and sponsored this video.