Water for Non-Thirsty Horses - Open Source And Community

I am off to the Open Source Think Tank conference in Napa this week (along with Matt Asay, Marten Mickos and Gianugo Rabellino) with one burning question on my mind: how do you leverage open source "goodness" into vibrant community "greatness."

To torture a metaphor, making a product open source in an emerging market is like making water free in a land where the horses don't know they're thirsty. Going open source is not enough, the challenge is to also educate the developer market about a problem they don't know exists.

Where open source has been most successful in the enterprise has been in allowing a new entrant to gain a toehold in an existing commercial market. Open source "goodness" allowed MySQL to get traction in the crowded SQL database space and allowed JBoss to sneak past IBM and BEA in the app server space.

An open source strategy has clear value when the market is well established. In the case of WaveMaker, however, we are evangelizing a new category. Because the last ten years of web development has been code-centric, Java and C# developers don't wake up in the morning looking for visual tools to help them build their Web 2.0 applications.

A sign of how far the market has gotten away from the good old days of PowerBuilder and visual programming is that people think the Ruby on Rails is a good high productivity alternative to Java and Spring. Substituting one complex code framework for another is not exactly a dramatic step forward in democratizing web development.

Larry Augustin helped me think about this over breakfast last month. He pointed out that the traditional way to evangelize a new market is to pour lots of money into analyst relations and PR. The open source way to do this is to make a better mousetrap available to an open source community and stand back while the world beats a path to your door.

This is probably overly optimistic. Making a product open source lowers the barriers to adoption but doesn't actually drive adoption, particularly as enterprise IT remembers both the promises and shortfalls of Rapid Application Development in its previous incarnations.

Creating a community means finding a way to make developers aware of a problem they don't always know they have. Making WaveMaker available under open source is a first step, but the real work will come in creating a community around WaveMaker that evangelizes the need for more productive web tools.

Got ideas about how we can build the WaveMaker community - let me know!

The Great J2EE to .NET Migration

Rod Johnson of SpringSource spoke on my panel last week at the WebGuild conference. One topic we discussed was the need for the Java community to wake up to the reality that an increasing number of companies are moving from Java to .NET.

For ten years, the ponderous J2EE standard has made the lives of Java programmers everywhere miserable. While various Java standards committees considered gravely what to do next, corporations have been steadily moving to .NET.

In our market research for WaveMaker, we have found that a over 30% of the corporate IT market has moved from Java to .NET. As with many other Microsoft technologies (SQL Server comes to mind), Microsoft has gone from having a laughable solution to getting the last laugh.

We have also found a surprising number of Java developers who tell us that the complexity of J2EE and the difficulty of finding experienced Java developers is forcing them to embrace .NET despite their loathing of all things Microsoft.

Spring and WaveMaker are two companies addressing the core problems underlying this market shift. Spring is the application server that J2EE should have been – lightweight and powerful. WaveMaker is the visual development platform J2EE never had.

Together, Spring and WaveMaker offer a compelling and highly productive alternative to .NET.

How compelling? One of our Fortune 500 customers built the same application (57 web pages, 28 database tables) in both .NET and WaveMaker. The app built with WaveMaker was completed with one third the man-hours and 98% less code (more on this in a later post).

The conclusion is stark - either the Java and open source community needs to put good productivity solutions in the hands of corporate customers, or the data center will go the way of the desktop.