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Tuesday, January 4, 2000 | Last Updated 4:00pm
CONVERSATIONS
The First Major Open Source Database
by Doc Searls <doc@ssc.com>
4-Jan-2000
Doc Searls interviews Inprise President and CEO Dale Fuller.
Go to the Inprise (aka the Inprise Borland) Web site. There you will witness
two highly significant developments: 1) the
Corel-like linuxification of yet another leading PC software company; and 2)
news that the company has open-sourced
InterBase 6, the latest version of its cross-platform relational database. T
he product will be open source in all its versions,
including Linux, Windows NT and Solaris.
InterBase is a first-rank relational database with customers that include Mo
torola, Nokia, MCI, Northern Telecom, Bear
Stearns, the Money Store, the US Army, NASA, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange
, First National Bank of Chicago and
Boeing. It's hard to find an unkind word about this product, which competes
with Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server, among
other big-time database applications. So opening the source is a highly ausp
icious move.
Linux Journal senior editor Doc Searls talked about the move with Dale Fulle
r, Inprise President & CEO. Fuller came to
Inprise less than a year ago to turn around what was once the premier franch
ise in software development tools - and in many
ways still is. What followed has been a steady corporate drift toward Linux
and the open source community, which is a natural
constituency for Delphi and other popular Inprise Borland tools.
With this announcement, the company seems to have made a millennial shift in
to what might become a full-fledged Linux
company (or at least as full-fledged as one can be when, like Corel, it stil
l sells goods and services for other platforms). It also
gives to the Linux community a very serious tools for migrating corporate da
tabases off other platforms and onto Linux, among
other significant things.
Doc Searls: I recently heard that you have some Linux credentials of your ow
n.
Dale Fuller: Back in 1996 at WhoWhere, I developed the single largest Web si
te in the world running on Linux:
Angelfire.com. It's still running on Linux and is one of the most popular si
tes on the Web.
Doc Searls: So why did you go with Linux?
Dale Fuller:When we did Mail City--an earlier site--we did it entirely in So
laris. It was roughly equal in size to Angelfire, but
Angelfire cost one tenth as much because we built it on Linux rather than So
laris.
Doc Searls: Today let's talk about what's going on with InterBase. Why did y
ou go open source with it?
Dale Fuller: Until now, InterBase hasn't been a core asset at Inprise--at le
ast as a revenue source. In that area it's been small.
But it has huge value in so many other ways. This is a world class, bulletpr
oof, fully-tested application that just about everyone
needs. So to gain momentum in the marketplace we decided to open source the
product. Open source is a word of mouth
market, and that's what InterBase needs. And InterBase is what the open sour
ce development community needs, too, because
InterBase not only fills a huge hole for enterprises, but gives them a way t
o migrate in a serious way from one platform to
another - especially to Linux. There is an explosion of demand for Linux and
we can serve that demand by providing a free and
open database product that is already proven and tested over the last fiftee
n years.
Doc Searls: How big do you expect this to be?
Dale Fuller: We expect it to be huge. We have a gigantic following today, by
pure market share standards. But what you
want with open source is something that serves the whole community, not just
a nice piece of it. It's a different game, and one
to which this is both timely and well-suited.
Doc Searls: And the prospects were pretty bleak in the commercial marketplac
e.
Dale Fuller: Exactly. Having a great product isn't enough. You need to spend
big marketing dollars just to begin driving
awareness. We don't have that kind of money, and we're not interested in pla
ying that game any more.
Doc Searls: Especially since word of mouth is free.
Dale Fuller: Exactly. The Linux market is still young, and our timing is sti
ll early, and the mechanisms for growth are extremely
powerful. There is a huge need for what InterBase has already been doing for
a long time, and the word of mouth in the open
source development community should be very strong, very fast.
Doc Searls: And it will help pull through lots of other products.
Dale Fuller:Yes. That includes the Delphi product for Linux, the J Builder p
roducts for Linux. These will all be optimized to
work very tightly with InterBase.
Doc Searls:What kind of license will you use? GPL? BSD? Mozilla? Something d
ifferent?
Dale Fuller:We don't have a decision on that yet. But we do want to do right
by the open source community. So let me just
say at this point that we're thinking hard about it, and open to input.
Doc Searls: How does InterBase stack up against--or with--existing Linux dat
abase products, like MySQL?
Dale Fuller:It's complimentary. MySQL is nice as far as it goes, but InterBa
se is the only commercially developed, tested and
deployed open sourced database product in the world. Its Java support is unb
eatable. So is its performance. Even before we
open-sourced it, no other RDBMS was easier to port between platforms. And no
other database could scale from desktops to
huge, industrial-strength systems. Those advantages will only increase.
Doc Searls: Are you going to manage this out of your current corporate infra
structure, or is this too different?
Dale Fuller: We are setting up a separate company to manage the whole proces
s. We'll try to follow the paths already beaten
by Red Hat, VA Linux, TurboLinux and others. We want to consolidate a core d
evelopment team, make our money on
service and support and adjunct products, do the compatibility testing, and
work with the community to make sure there is one
source that doesn't fork.
Doc Searls: Do you expect that database - the InterBase database - can be pa
rt of a standard Linux distribution?
Dale Fuller: I do. I absolutely do. We're talking about building material he
re. That's the great appeal of Linux: it's better
building material, and open source is a better building method. To run with
that metaphor, you need more than just nails. You
need boards. You need lumber. In most enterprises, that's the data. And in m
ost cases the data is more important than the
applications. You need something that's bulletproof, that doesn't have memor
y leaks, that's reliable and proven. You get that
with InterBase. It's a huge advantage.
Doc Searls: What's to stop others from offering the same thing?
Dale Fuller: Nothing. But they will not be as mature. Here's a product that
is already on sixty different platforms, used by
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. Our 911 system in the United S
tates is run on it. Now it becomes available to
everyone. Think about what that means for enterprises that are only beginnin
g to adopt Linux now. It knocks down a huge
barrier to adoption.
Doc Searls: You see it as a way for companies to migrate to Linux?
Dale Fuller: I see it in a big way. We built this as a cross-platform produc
t. Any data that you have on Solaris will
immediately run on Linux. You just port your application over. You don't hav
e to worry about your data structures. That's
fundamental to what makes InterBase such a sweet product. It runs on Solaris
, Linux, Windows, AIX, multiple flavors of
UNIX, even Wang systems from years gone by. So when you're an in-house compa
ny looking to expand and get out into the
world of application server technology, you need a way for your data to move
with you. The good news is, with InterBase, you
can do this easily and quickly.
Doc Searls: Instead of building over again on another platform, you move who
le buildings.
Dale Fuller: You move CAD drawings from one output to another output, rather
than having to FedEx or fax them. You
move the entire architecture over.
Doc Searls: Because the data structures remain intact.
Dale Fuller: Exactly. And because we have the fifteen years of experience at
doing it successfully across all these platforms,
we bring a lot to the open source table. Including big-time customers who ne
ed to find a way to make the leap to Linux. There
is something for everybody here. We want to see people involved in testing i
t, improving it, submitting their findings and
changes back to the organization, and circulating back out the constantly im
proved versions that anybody can use.
Doc Searls: And you want to build an organization customers can buy support
from.
Dale Fuller: Yes. That's where we make our money.
Doc Searls: I think you're among the first in the open source world to direc
tly go after what we might call Practical
IT. These are guys getting work done in large organizations, busily adopting
Linux because they like its virtues. They
are part of the movement in a practical sense, but not part of The Cause. Mo
st of them I would guess are not heavy
Slashdot readers, or if they are they don't post there. Which makes them a b
it invisible. But we know they are out
there, because we know from IBM, HP and many other large companies tell us t
hat their companies are full of these
people, who are making the choice to migrate enthusiastically from NT and va
rious UNIX flavors to Linux. It seems to
me that's your constituency.
Dale Fuller: Yes. And they care about the future, too. Take a topic like EJB
, Enterprise Java Beans. Those beans become
transferable; I can sell, give, buy or take templates for, say, spreadsheets
. This constituency likes that kind of transferability
across both vertical and horizontal platforms. Well, that's what open source
InterBase will give them. No matter what platform
you have, wherever you are, you don't have to worry about your data.
Doc Searls: So its virtues are a lot like Java.
Dale Fuller: Only not so closed. We're going open source all the way.
Doc Searls: And you think it will be easier to do that with a new company th
an with your old one.
Dale Fuller: Yes. What we're setting up will be the host organization outsid
e our company. We don't want to do what
Netscape tried to do, which wasn't very successful. We need a separate entit
y. We are funding it, but only as one source of
funding. We want the community to help fund it, and own shares in it.
Doc Searls: Have you talked to some of the service players, like Linuxcare?
Dale Fuller: Yes we have. Also with Corel, TurboLinux, Red Hat and others.
Doc Searls: Are they ready to include you in their upcoming distributions?
Dale Fuller: We're moving to the next level of discussions. But I'm confiden
t. This is the only serious database product in the
world that is Linux compatible, that is actually available in open source fo
rm and that appeals at every level, in a very big way.
There is no down side, for anybody.
Doc Searls: What does this do to Oracle?
Dale Fuller: It fires a bit of a cannonball across their bow. It is going to
be much more difficult for them to follow along. Their
whole game is about deployment and charging money after you develop on it. I
think open sourcing InterBase will have a more
immediate effect where Solaris and Windows NT are deployed. One reason is th
at it validates the Linux platform in a very
significant way. It makes Linux far more competitive as a platform. With Lin
ux you already have something that amazingly in a
very short time is revolutionizing the world. This will step up that revolut
ion by making databases a significant part of it.
Doc Searls: And in what situations does it threaten Solaris and NT?
Dale Fuller: Growing ones. NT is not the most scalable OS. Solaris is more s
calable, but it's also expensive, so high cost itself
is an impediment to growth. Customers are constantly looking for economicall
y scalable solutions. The combination of Linux
and InterBase gives them that. We also have a translator that transforms the
entire data set out of SQL Server and into
InterBase. And it will run under Linux or Solaris or any other platform. Thi
s is very appealing.
Doc Searls: The notion we've had for a long time is that you're building on
an operating system platform. But in fact
your building itself is mostly data, no matter what platform you build it on
. Data is what you care about.
Dale Fuller: Yes. And what you get with an open source approach to data is f
ar more safety. Because you can actually see
what this database application is doing to your data. You can get under the
floor and see what's causing the squeak.
Doc Searls: That's an interesting redefinition of data, because it presumes
that responsibility belongs to the builders
rather than the suppliers. It isn't like the old days when you wanted to tru
st the large company that would send out
guys to fix your problem.
Dale Fuller: Enterprises increasingly want the flexibility to fix stuff them
selves. Or have some choice about the help they get.
You can still go out and hire somebody to fix your problem, but isn't it nic
e to know you have some options here?
Doc Searls: And that there is a wide-open market for those services.
Dale Fuller: I think what you're giving people is choices. Before they never
had that.
Doc Searls: And you think scalability is the big issue.
Dale Fuller: I think scalability is going to be a gigantic problem, one that
's going to make a lot of Linux converts out of a lot of
big companies.
Doc Searls: One key is going to be exposing some of what's actually happenin
g with Linux in enterprises. As we just
said, that activity is not always visible.
Dale Fuller: In many cases, companies don't want to give away a technical ad
vantage. It's a secret weapon. That's why I told
my competitors at HotMail, "Man, we've got to stay Solaris all the time." Me
anwhile we were marching down the path of
Linux, making money because Linux was cheap.
Doc Searls: So you didn't talk up Linux when you were doing Angelfire.
Dale Fuler: No, we didn't. Another reason was that, frankly, we didn't hate
Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft was willing to pay
us millions of dollars to port one of our applications to NT. Maybe that put
us out of the Linux mainstream at that time; but
Linux has grown since then, and it now includes a lot of companies like ours
, that use both platforms - and others as well.
Companies like this take very pragmatic views of these matters. Basically, t
hey want something that's bulletproof and scales.
InterBase always gave them that, but now it will be in a new and better way.
Doc Searls: So you're clearly in the Linux movement now.
Dale Fuller: Back then we were deeply in the movement, but just not in a hig
hly visible way. Now we're changing that.
Doc Searls: How does it feel to be a Linux company?
Dale Fuller: Great. I love what's happening now, because I was in the UNIX w
orld a long time ago, in the early 80s, when
AI was the rage. I worked on Common LISP at TI. The Micro Explorer was my pr
oject. The problem was, we had to do the
sexy thing. We had to solve all the problems of the world, and that just was
n't a commercially workable goal. Industry kept
coming back to us and saying, "Just solve one friggin' problem." We couldn't
. Academia went for perfection and destroyed AI,
because they didn't focus on the business aspects of it. I'm not seeing this
with Linux. This time there is a consensus about the
general direction of things, and solving business problems is a big part of
it.
Doc Searls: As an ex-Apple guy, are you glad to see the company make open so
urce moves with OS-X?
Dale Fuller: I think it's absolutely the right move. It will drive so much m
ore adoption, and bringing in more ingenuity, more
creativity. The more open you can make it, the more opportunities you have f
or developers to get in and actually make things
worthwhile. That's the great thing about Linux. Nobody owns it, so it become
s a very creative platform. It makes me
encourage Microsoft to open their OS.
Doc Searls: I don't think it's out of the question.
Dale Fuller: It's two years away.
Doc Searls: They need more of a sex change before they'll do it; but fundame
ntally they are a practical company, and
they have no religion about keeping alive their dying products, which is a r
eal advantage.
Dale Fuller: Meanwhile, there's lots to do here, and we're ready. And we inv
ite Linux Journal readers to jump in and help
with this thing, any way they can.
Copyright © 1999 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
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