Bickel Blog

Tonight I read about Oracle's lawsuit against Google and then HP's suit against Oracle. I got depressed and did a couple of sarcastic Tweets. Then I opened up the NYTimes and read IBM's essay celebrating their 100 years . While it takes a couple of cheap shots at founder-driven companies (Apple, Oracle and Facebook envy), it is a very aspirational piece. My favorite quote is: "I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself, except its beliefs." - Thomas Watson, Jr. I admit, I am a sucker for IBM. My Dad worked there from the mid 1960's until his retirement. I had a summer job in the Glendale Labs where I wrote 11 lines of code that went into all of the company's 300 and 600 lpm band printers in the late 70's. I attended a day long class in the history and culture of IBM, learning the importance of THINK , of respect, and the value of technology. Tom Watson, ...

CloudBees took another important step forward in fulfilling our vision as the Java PaaS innovation leader with the announcement of the CloudBees Partner Ecosystem . CloudBees knows that we can not develop everything ourselves – and that customers want choice and flexibility. Here are the first partners, with more coming soon: JFrog Artifactory - Binary Repository - think Super Maven! SonarSource - the leading open source Static Code Analysis. Sauce Labs / Selenium - the leading open source based cross-browser testing service. Cloudant - Clustered, cloud-based CoachDB (noSQL) service. New Relic - the leading Cloud Monitoring service. The Cloud offers new ways of partnering and bringing solutions to customers, and CloudBees is enabling that in an open, flexible, easy-to-use offering. For Java Developers and IT shops: • Extends the low cost of doing business on the Cloud. • Enabling extended services is as simple as clicking a button. • Integration is already done in the Cloud ...

CloudBees is in an interesting position being so far ahead of the rest of the competitors in the Java PaaS space. We have a GA offering that is basically competing with Beta versions from VMWare ( Cloud Foundry ) and Red Hat ( OpenShift ). So we have to price our full offering ahead of our competitors. We all have free versions. Given the market is early, this might be the most important thing today given that a lot of people want to experiment and learn and understand how the Cloud can play in their development and deployment cycles. It is likely we will all keep free versions. For example, CloudBees offers up to 300 free minutes of Jenkins build time per month on the dev side ( lots more for Open Source Projects ) and up to 5 apps on the RUN@cloud side. Of course those 5 free apps are not scalable, or have high availability or have SSL or have custom URL's. But certainly very useful for learning, testing and even small apps that are non-critical. The interesting part come...

To borrow & adapt a line from the Supreme Court, "You know Karma when you see it". Clearly, the Hudson project has had bad Karma hanging over it due to Oracle's moves that forced the re-creation of the project as Jenkins - http://jenkins-ci.org/content/hudsons-future . The idea of forcing most of the community out did not sit well with people, and the resulting fast adoption of Jenkins as the default best open source CI offering in the market followed. See KK's slides for the rapid adoption of Jenkins – http://www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/current-state-of-jenkins . What is surprising to me is that Eclipse has seemingly backed the proposal already (see comments from the Eclipse Foundation leads Mike Milinkovich and Ian Skerrett in the threads quoted below defending the proposal and trying to educate others on open source). It surprises me on two levels. First, Eclipse has a deservedly sterling reputation. Maybe Karma does not transfer, but it seems to me that th...

To date there have been several ways to monetize open source projects: - Don't. Just donate your time and code. - S ugardaddy. Get a job at a big company that embeds your open source project in other products that make money. - Services. Do consulting or training. - "Pro" version. This is where most of the scalable open source businesses have gone like Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, Spring, etc. This is typically some combination of support, packaging of bits, and enhanced features like the Red Hat or JBoss Network. For those open source projects looking to expand, there was often frustration that only a few percent of the users who were all gaining value form the project would actually pay anything. This has limited growth. Look at RedHat being a $1B company and VMWare being a $2B+ (much younger) company. The reason is quite simple - there are free ways to get Red Hat's technology and you have to pay VMWare to get their technology. Well, the Cloud has opened up a...

CloudBees announced today that our Platform as a Service for Java , RUN@cloud, will be running on VMWare's ubiquitous vSphere and the emerging OpenStack platform. This is great news for Java developers and people deploying Java applications. Platform as a Service is certainly sweeping the development community like app servers did a decade ago. It brings a new level of savings, efficiency and agility. No need to worry about all the deployment and provisioning details. Just develop and go! PaaS is part of a stack, though. And customers will have many requirements about the stack they run on. This announcement opens up all sorts of flexible and affordable options for running your Java applications: - Run on Amazon. - Run on your own servers that have vSphere already. - Run on your own servers on the new, low cost, open source OpenStack IaaS. This addresses many customer's desire to get off the VMWare high cost virtualization wagon. It moves the virtualization up to the J...

As I wrote a month ago , there was a lot of emotion around the Jenkins - Hudson split, but the reality is they are two separate projects. The purpose of this blog is to look at what has transpired over the past month and a half and how it is obvious why Hudson users should upgrade to Jenkins. It was triggered by a company wanting input on whether they should go down the Hudson or Jenkins route. They had talked with Jason at Sonatype to get the Hudson version and they wanted to talk with KK and others for the Jenkins side. I put together a bunch of data (mostly collected from others) and thought I would share it. Here are the reasons why Jenkins will win: Jenkins Developers If you liked Hudson, you will like Jenkins. The developers who wrote 99% of the core are now writing Jenkins. This includes Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the original creator of Hudson. And of course it is built on the same base. We think this will lead to more stability, better bug crushing and more new features faster....