It’s about time. William Hurley is announcing the news at OSCON. BMC has never done a good job of spanning development and operations- and these days its increasingly about the lifecycle, rather than the operational waterfall. So a developer community makes sense, especially if they can get some ARS dorks on board. A dev community on its own is not necessarily a big deal. But combining it with a thoroughgoing open source strategy, based on BSD– well that is more interesting for sure. BMC is even talking about running an unconference. I said William had brought some cool, didn’t I?
HP already has a developer story through Mercury. But lacks in open source.
IBM through WebSphere and Rational.
CA- well, that’s a good question.
BMC is going organic. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, but things look good for BMC right now.
update: Cote offers a deeper analytical perspective here. I tend to be quite positive on news like this. Mostly because I see BMC’s moves here as a first, not a last step. As with Adobe’s “just” open sourcing an Flex SDK recently, BMC is not open sourcing its prime money makers. But contributions and open course culture can take on a life of their own. Watch this space. Oh yeah one other thing- “whurley”.
IBM is patron. BMC is very nearly a patron. CA is a sponsor. Adobe is a sponsor. Explanation of levels here.
Steve Loughran says:
July 25, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Actually, if you were to look at what HP Labs has been doing with SmartFrog you can see that HP’s got some good OSS projects underway, its just not (yet) the centerpiece of the developer story. But that can change.
People Over Process » BMC’s Developer Network and Open Source Announcement says:
July 25, 2007 at 8:42 pm
[…] has a nice and concise post on the topic for those who don’t like plodding through the below […]
Niraj J says:
July 25, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Failed to see how you compare HP IT Management offering with Websphere and Rational. To me that is a application development space. And MErcury is really focussed on testing ?? Maybe I am missing something here.
jgovernor says:
July 25, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Niraj – my point was about lifecycle and community touchpoints to the lifecycle.
websphere and rational give IBM a developer play.
mercury has a strong following in testing, but many development shops are loyal to the tool.
note the new BMC angle is about developers, rather than traditional operational management customers.
Any clearer?
Steve- HP labs does indeed have a lot of interesting research going on. HP also sells a lot of systems to support OSS> HP for example offers support for Debian. But in terms of a contribution and community-based open source strategy, not so much at this point.
Niraj J says:
July 26, 2007 at 5:36 am
thanks for the clarification
jgovernor says:
July 26, 2007 at 9:35 am
no problem Niraj. I probably wasn’t completely clear in the first place- it was a very quickly written piece talking to the news.
Niraj J says:
August 9, 2007 at 12:05 am
Just a thought – Hp is eyeing for aquisitions and I heard the rumor that they were going to aquire Weblogic. (which would be about 6 billion)
IMHO :
They should target – Redhat (potentially cheaper by 500 million) and they will fill two gaps in there offerings
1. Middleware
2. Open source
HPQ has about 16billion in the bank they want to spend.
jgovernor says:
August 9, 2007 at 3:28 pm
hey niraj- the HP BEA rumour is a long-standing one. it may well yet happen