had a pretty good week with endorsements from and . Both relationships were developed after I left VMware so what follows is purely speculation on my part. But some companies have a tough time getting over their history and playbooks, so it is easy to imagine how things went down.
Warning: this post contains serious "inside baseball" about the past and present of software standardization and open source mechanics. If you don't know what ECMA oxymoronically used to mean or haven't debated the merits of different open source licenses, you may want to stop reading right now (go see or read up on instead). I may be the only person who gets some of these jokes. Apologies to David Mamet.
OPEN SEASON
Scene: a hipster office in SOMA populated by dogs, twenty-something Siamese programmers and two older gentlemen trying with limited success to project a casual air.
Characters:
Jim - a executive
Dan - an IBM executive
Angel - an IBM standards executive
Dan: We're from the IBM company and today is your lucky day. We have decided Cloud Foundry is going to be the platform-as-a-service for the cloud.
Jim: Oh
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Dan: The way this will work is IBM will make Cloud Foundry open and therefore viable for the enterprise. We know how to do this and will tell you what you have to do.
Jim: I'm not sure I follow as our strategy has been to make Cloud Foundry as open as possible from day one. Am I missing something?
Dan: Cloud Foundry cannot be used in the enterprise until IBM gives it our blessing. It is critical that enterprises only use open technologies.
Jim: Open like the mainframe?
Dan: Watch your tone son. We're from IBM and we make sure that enterprises are not locked into proprietary technologies.
Jim: I'm definitely not following you. What do you mean by "open"?
Dan: Openness depends on having a comprehensive governance strategy. We will work with you to create a Cloud Foundry Foundation to manage the governance of Cloud Foundry.
Jim: What exactly would such a Foundation do? And isn't "Cloud Foundry Foundation" kind of awkward phrasing? Did you consider just Foundration? That domain might still be available.
Dan: The Cloud Foundry Foundation will handle the governance of Cloud Foundry. With a formal governance process as defined in bylaws, Cloud Foundry will then be open so enterprise customers can embrace it.
Jim: Hmm.. I assume you'd describe GE as an enterprise customer. They've embraced Cloud Foundry to the tune of . And they've never mentioned the word governance as far as I can recall. They have been known to throw around terms like productivity and time-to-market.
Dan: Let me help you understand how this will work. Do you remember Java and Linux? IBM made those technologies successful in the enterprise by ensuring they were open. We will do the same thing for Cloud Foundry. But you will need to follow our direction.
Jim: You'll have to excuse me as I was in junior high school when you were running that playbook for Java and Linux. But I'm still not certain what this has to do with Cloud Foundry.
Dan: Enterprise customers expect new technologies have formal governance processes so they can trust them to be open. For example, it is critical there be explicit rules to specify the voting rights for different classes of membership and how to deal with conflicts of interest on the board of directors.
Jim: I am afraid I still don't understand what this has to do with making it easier for customers to build applications for the cloud. I defer to your knowledge of the previous century as well as conflicts of interest, but it seems customers today are more focused on functioning code that solves their business problems than governance processes. But you should explain to me what governance you think is necessary.
Dan: The Cloud Foundry Foundation will be a legal entity with a steering committee which will define all the subcommittees necessary for different aspects of Cloud Foundry. Obviously, we will use Robert's Rules of Order.
Jim: Is this how you created the Java programming model?
Dan: Exactly.
Jim: You do know the majority of enterprise Java development is done today with the Spring Framework which was developed to shelter developers from the horrors of committee-developed technologies like EJB?
Dan: Son, enterprises can't build enterprise solutions without enterprise technologies like EJB. When you start doing transactions, it is no longer child's play. You may have your simple solutions for simple problems, but IBM solves enterprise problems.
Jim: I won't ask how it is that the biggest Internet companies on the planet somehow manage to do transactions at vastly greater scale than any enterprise that uses IBM technology. I guess I should also be surprised the cloud has gotten as far as it has without any committees and Robert's Rules of Order.
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Jim: Your faith in committees is touching, but pretty much for every broadly successful technology in the world today, there was a committee-driven alternative that failed. Take IP vs. OSI, or HTML succeeding only by throwing away the vast standardized bulk of SGML. I think the world has learned from these experiences. We have seen over and over that committees are prone to making bad political tradeoffs, delivering least common denominator solutions and losing sight of the real problem at hand. Premature standardization is a killer; you need to allow for experimentation, evolution and finding the proverbial product-market fit.
Dan: Son, you need to understand how things work in the enterprise.
Jim: Is there more to IBM's cloud strategy than a for standards? Do you really think a bunch of random committees are going to keep up with Amazon Web Services? I guess it could be a good strategy if they're laughing so hard they can't get any work done.
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Dan: Let me give you a recent example. Have you heard of OpenStack? IBM is making OpenStack part of the open enterprise cloud.
Jim: I am familiar with OpenStack as it turns out. In fact, Cloud Foundry runs on OpenStack. I do seem to recall you guys jumped on the OpenStack bandwagon a couple years after it got started. Are you saying IBM is somehow responsible for OpenStack's momentum?
Dan: IBM is making OpenStack open and acceptable for enterprises.
Jim: So what contributions have you made to OpenStack?
Angel: We have dozens of our best standards people working on OpenStack.
Jim: I was thinking more in terms of code. NASA and Rackspace have contributed major pieces of technology - what has IBM brought to OpenStack?
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Jim: Well, even if software development is not your focus, you do operate a lot of outsourced IT infrastructure. With IBM's enterprise presence you must have a lot of customers running OpenStack today. How many megawatts of OpenStack capacity are you operating?
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Jim: I'm not sure where you guys have been for the last decade, but the world has changed. We now achieve openness at the engineering level, not with lawyers writing bylaws and Robert's Rules of Order. The days of heavyweight governance via committees staffed by people whose primary skill is sleeping while sitting up have probably come and gone. Cloud Foundry is extremely open today by any practical measure. The code is all on GitHub under the very permissive Apache license. Is there something we're missing?
Angel: What is this Geet Hub? Can you spell that for me?
Jim: GitHub is a public code repository. Anyone can submit a pull request and contribute code to the project. If you don't like the vision or want to do something different that is more tailored to your specific needs, you can always fork the project and take it in whatever direction you want.
Dan: (visibly flinching and frothing) Are you mad? Anyone can just contribute code? To a product that will be used by enterprises?
Dan: You encourage people to fragment the project by modifying it and making derivative works? (pause)Do you not know any history boy? We spent years trying to minimize Java fragmentation. Microsoft would taunt us that even Ivory soap was only 99 and 44/100th pure. Despite Herculean efforts, we never quite achieved it, but we tell ourselves, much like with the current economic recovery, it could have been so much worse. You would let anyone do whatever they want with the software? (aghast)
Dan: How will enterprises ensure they're getting the official version of Cloud Foundry? Do you not see how critical it is to have a Foundation that controls Cloud Foundry?
Jim: The market decides what the best version of Cloud Foundry is, not some committee. If you don't like the direction, you could always fork and go in whatever direction you think is most appropriate. One would think with 400,000 or so employees, IBM would have some people who could write code as opposed to committee minutes.
Dan: Surely you jest. We can't rely on the market to make decisions for the enterprise. That is IBM's role and has been since the dawn of information technology. If you don't fully appreciate the criticality of governance, we can go elsewhere. We have options. We could bless , sorry I mean OpenShift instead. I bet Red Hat would play ball. We're old friends with their standards guys.
Jim: Good luck with that.
Dan: Or we could bring the full might of IBM's research labs to bear and build our own platform-as-a-service. Don't underestimate the technological prowess of the IBM company. We get more every year than any other company. We can write the letters IBM at the atomic level. We are going to positively own the burgeoning robotic game show contestant market. We can make WebSphere the application platform for the cloud. WebSphere is the biggest middleware on the planet, though I'm not sure why the development team was laughing when they said that. If you don't hand over Cloud Foundry to the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we'll just compete with you.
Jim: You'd think with all those , you'd have more innovation to show in your product line and wouldn't be here trying to figure out how to co-opt the fruits of someone else's R&D. I get that what's yours is yours, like the mainframe, but you'd also like what other people have developed to be under your control. You're welcome to participate in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem on the same level playing field as everyone else, but we're not going to distract ourselves from building a great platform with some giant bureaucratic foundation. If you want to compete, by all means compete, but at some point you're going to have to write some code people actually want to use. Maybe you can create an IDE that lets people write code at the atomic level. And with all due respect, WebSphere at this point is just a middleware museum. It is about as relevant to the cloud as the mainframe.
Dan (quietly to Angel): They're onto us. Our strategy of blessing different piece parts defined by multiple slow-moving and conflicted committees that don't work together well and need busloads of consultants to make them limp along may not fly in the cloud. This may be a problem for our . Our CFO told Wall Street we'd have $7 billion in cloud revenues by 2015 and SmartCloud unfortunately isn't looking that smart.
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Jim: I'll tell you what. I'd hate for you to have to go back to Armonk and get by your CEO again for not working hard enough and not bothering to return customer calls. We're doing a Cloud Foundry developer conference this fall and how about IBM sponsor breakfast there or something? You can buy some healthy fare and we can explain how in the past you would have brought donuts, but you've gotten religion about reducing middleware girth. You can even come to the advisory board meeting. And of course you can submit all the code you want to the project, but I realize that may not be your thing. But I do have one request if we're going to work together: please don't ever use that the word governance again in my presence.
Angel: It's still early days for the cloud.
Jim: Yes, it's still early days for the cloud at IBM.
FINIS
Note: the voices in my head for this are the default voices. In the sequel, will make an appearance.
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