I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

Yesterday, Brendan Eich stepped down as Mozilla CEO. If you've been living under a rock, it was because in 2008 he made a donation to the Proposition 8 campaign, which successfully (albiet temporarily) stopped the legality of same-sex marriage in California. There was a large backlash by employees and general internet community members about this.

As an out gay man working in technology, whose last significant post was specifically about the DOMA ruling (before it came out and I got all happy that for once something positive happened to gay rights in America nation-wide), you might think I'm happy about this. After all, Prop 8 was a truly shameful example of exactly how the California state referendum system can be used easily as a way for the majority to trample on the minority, and how easy it is for out-of-state interests to bankroll what should be a purely internal issue based on ideological/religious interests. You might think I'm cheering that mob rule for once worked in my favor.

I'm not.

Yesterday I was conflicted.

Today I think this was wrong and short sighted.

There is no doubt that Brendan is on the wrong side of history. The law has changed, public opinion has changed dramatically since Prop 8 passed, history will prove that Brendan's position was a historical anachronism. I don't even have to know or care why he donated to the Prop 8 campaign to know this.

I know there've been calls to say "Yes, but he hasn't changed his mind!" Quite frankly, I don't know if this is the case and again, I don't care. It will just make him seem even more on the wrong side of history before long. I'm fine with that. (And if you think he's ever going to change his mind after this, you don't know how the human mind works).

What I do know is this:

• The State of California gives gay employees of Mozilla (a for-profit corporation) the legal rights and remedies that we've fought for if Brendan was to have attempted to discriminate, overtly or surreptitiously, against employees who are in a same-sex marriage.
• Brendan has not whilst he was CEO done anything to indicate that he would attempt to act in such a way as to do that in the first place. In fact, he's attempted to be as reassuring as he can be.
• Brendan has not attempted to use his position as CEO to promote personal causes in the political arena that would be contrary to the diversity of the work force (e.g. he's not pulled a Hobby Lobby or Chik-fil-a).
• Were he to do so either of those things, given how public this has been, the board of directors would be within their rights to do the single thing a board of directors has the legal right and obligation to do in such a situation: fire the CEO.

I imagination a situation where the shoe is on the other foot. I imagine a situation where I was put in charge of a large and diverse technical organization, one where I had already established myself in the technical realm, and employees demanding that I be fired because I was gay. Isn't that what we've been fighting against?

But even more than that, history has shown that the way that people's minds change about these issues is day to day exposure to close associates (friends, family members, co-workers, employees) that are open about their sexuality. Over time, it transforms their views from these people are strange and different to these people are just like me, but gay.

It's why even extremely Christian identifying young adults are gradually becoming in favor of legalized civil same-sex marriage.

What the people rushing for the pitchforks have ignored is that this virtually guarantees that Brendan, and people like him, will choose to self-segregate themselves in the future from highly diverse organizations. And that is exactly what leads to societal mores not changing.

So no, I'm not pleased about this. I think it's just a victory for mob rule as Prop 8 was in the first place. And I had hoped we as gay people, had all moved beyond that.

My Open Letter to the European Competition Commissioner

Monty urged me to help save MySQL. I couldn't possibly refuse such an offer.

Dear Competition Commissioner:

I am the Chief Executive and Technology Officer for OpenGamma, a financial technology startup located in the United Kingdom. I am writing to urge you to immediately and unconditionally approve the merger of Oracle and Sun.

I have a long standing history with both the Open Source and Database communities, having worked for a number of database startups in the United States of America, as well as working at early-stage companies making use and refining a number of Open Source technologies. I also have experience working at Oracle during a summer internship while I was attending the University of California at Berkeley.

Furthermore, in my more recent career as a consumer (rather than producer) of database technologies, I have setup and managed numerous, large MySQL installations, including one with more than 10 nodes and 150GB of active data (and several terabytes of archive data) in the financial services industry. I have also been a customer of Oracle's database technology for systems even larger.

In my mind, there is no logical reason to reject this merger based on considerations for the MySQL technology.

First of all, as a consumer of database technologies, I can tell you that Oracle and MySQL simply do not compete in the marketplace. While customers have replaced Oracle with MySQL, the applications based on Oracle that were ported to MySQL were never good candidates for Oracle and would have been ported to another database engine in due course as Oracle moves to the highest end of the market. Customers have numerous options for porting their applications off of Oracle onto a lower-cost database engine; MySQL simply has the most brand recognition in this space. Furthermore, MySQL has been used as a pricing lever by Oracle customers rather than an active option for migration.

That implies that Oracle's ownership of MySQL might see a reduction in competition for Oracle's core product, but there is a flourishing Open Source database market these days (which there wasn't when MySQL was originally created): Ingres, Firebird, LucidDB and PostgreSQL are all far more applicable to the Oracle customer base than MySQL is. Even if MySQL development were to come to an immediate halt, this wouldn't harm consumers in a such an extremely competitive environment.

However, the continued uncertainty over the Sun acquisition is potentially far more anticompetitive for consumers of technology as a whole: Sun has a number of competitive products with far greater applicability than MySQL (including their storage, networking, and computer chip technology). Allowing those products to die because Sun ran out of cash during this phase of its life would be extremely and permanently damaging to the overall computer industry inside Europe, and reduce competition significantly. Delaying this merger over the matter of MySQL would result in far greater anticompetitive results to European consumers of computing technology than even the worst case arguments of biased, self-interested advocates in this matter.

Thank you for your time, and once again, I urge you to approve this merger unconditionally and without further delay.

Sincerely Yours,

Kirk Wylie
Chief Executive Officer
OpenGamma

Monty's Almost Certainly Looking For Investment

Remember how I predicted that Monty was attempting to create such an untenable situation for Oracle that they had to dispose of the MySQL IP and put it into his hands? Remember how all of Monty's protestations were based on the fact that he doesn't have the money to buy it? Remember how I said that he might not have it now, but could probably raise it?

Yeah. He's trying.

From Reuters, Florian Mueller is touring Wall Street:

EU strategist who is former MySQL shareholder and adviser announces Silicon Valley press conference (26 October) and New York City analyst briefing (27 October) -- Florian Mueller wants to "explain positions of critics of proposed transaction in the lion's den" -- New York event due to "strong Wall Street interest in the matter."

There haven't been any protestations from Wall Street that I've seen that they're unhappy with Oracle acquiring MySQL. Rather, this has been a European affair as Monty tries to get the EU to interfere in industrial policy for his own personal benefit. So why in the world would you send your sockpuppet to Wall Street to explain any positions? What interest would Wall Street have in the matter other than to provide funding?

You might argue that he's going there to talk about the position they're taking with the EU competition commission because there are lots of people who own Oracle and/or Sun stock, and might be interested in the matter. But I think a much simpler story is at least as likely: Florian is attempting to drum up a capital raise to acquire the MySQL IP to make the problem go away for Oracle, and to convince Oracle and Sun shareholders that Monty and Florian will do whatever it takes to block the acquisition so that they'll tell Larry to let go.

Add to the Look at the Balls on that Guy category: Florian Mueller.

Monty, Stallman, MySQL, Oracle, and Sun: Open Letter Wars

I've tried to confine my ranting about the current state of the Sun/Oracle/MySQL debates to my Twitter feed, but I think I need to do more than the 140 character limit allows.

Background On Recent Moves

In case you haven't been following the state of play, we've got two recent open letters sent to the EU competition commissioner:

• RMS, Knowledge Ecology International, and the Open Rights Group came out as strongly opposed to allowing the Sun/Oracle acquisition to proceed as long as MySQL was part of the acquisition.
• Monty suggested that Oracle be forced to sell MySQL as part of the Sun acquisition.

If you've been following either of my posts on the subject, you'll know I'm not a dispassionate observer in this matter, particularly where Mr. Widenius is involved.

Competition and Acquisition

First of all, let's directly address the core matter at hand, which is that Monty, RMS, and the various others appear to believe that the Database market is hopelessly consolidated and were Oracle to get its hands on the copyright to the MySQL source code that would be bad for competition.

This, to be honest, completely and utterly disregards the actual history of the database market, which has always been one of consolidation and benefits to the consumer:

• Illustra, a Berkeley spin-out, was bought by Informix
• Informix was bought by IBM
• RedBrick was bought by IBM
• RDB was bought by Oracle

While this consolidation has reduced the number of vendors in the market, as of 2007 there was still pretty hefty competition with Oracle even then only with a 44.1% share of the paid database market. As someone who has had to work professionally with Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL/Server, I can say this is almost certainly because it's the best overall product.

Furthermore, those numbers in terms of the database revenue are completely suspect (with the exception of Microsoft's). There's a huge amount of revenue for IBM and Oracle which are tied to services and software sitting on top of the database (such as Oracle applications and IBM services), and realistically the CFOs of each company can tune the percentage of the deal that goes to the underlying database based on what numbers they want to report. The overall deal may be $1MM, but the sales person has a lot of discretion on how they price the database component.

Is there so little competition in the market that it's hurting consumers? Hardly. The recent squabble over Oracle's TPC-C pseudo-announcements indicates that the vendors actively compete with each other. Furthermore, the rate of feature expansion has been truly dramatic. Finally, the ability of firms like Vertica to rapidly jump into the market indicates that this isn't a market that requires significant levels of competitive concern on the part of regulators.

The technology industry is based on larger firms buying smaller ones. Competition authorities should rightfully be concerned only if it harms consumers in general, not whether it harms a particular subset of users.

But MySQL Is Special

With all due respect, no it isn't.

Let's consider the pseudo-market for Open Source databases. We've got:

• MySQL and its various derivatives (like Drizzle)
• PostgreSQL and its various commercial/supported versions
• Ingres
• Firebird
• LucidDB

And that's just considering the relational ones. When you consider the NoSQL movement as potential competitors (which I, for example, most certainly do), MySQL just isn't that special anymore.

While it is possible that an Oracle acquisition might be bad for MySQL consumers, it doesn't follow that MySQL is so special and perfect and pure that it harms any general category of consumers. While databases aren't perfectly replaceable, if someone found that Oracle's stewardship of MySQL was so onerous that they wanted to move off of it, it wouldn't be impossible to move to another database, either commercial or Open Source.

What that means is that you're in a classic case where the acquisition of a particular company might be harmful to consumers of that company's products, but it doesn't generically affect the market in a negative way. IBM and Microsoft will continue to compete in the commercial space, and PostgreSQL, Ingres, and LucidDB will continue to compete in the Open Source space. There's no net harm to consumers as a whole from an acquisition, even if the result of the acquisition was the complete shutdown of all commercial support for MySQL.

Oracle Is A Bad Acquirer

First of all, let's get the obvious out of the way: Oracle bought BerkeleyDB, and continued to enhance it; Oracle bought InnoDB, and continued to enhance it. At no point did they crush them to drive Oracle database revenues, or change the licenses, or stop forward momentum. So when you look at the actual track record of the company, they're in the clear.

But they might do, because they're an evil, scary corporation that MySQL turned down once before (from the Stallman piece):

Oracle made an earlier effort to buy MySQL in 2006, but the management rejected Oracle's offer, in part because Oracle would not disclose its plan for MySQL, and some members of the MySQL management team were concerned that Oracle was only acquiring MySQL to curb its advances in the marketplace.

I know a number of people involved with MySQL when it was an independent organization. While there were people who worried about that fact, senior management wasn't. More importantly, Monty was willing to sell MySQL to Oracle in 2006 for the right price. The use of the words "in part" there are telling, because the primary consideration that MySQL's senior management had wasn't some happy-clappy love for the Libre Software Movement, it was money.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see what's changed in between 2006 and 2009 except that Monty is a whole heck of a lot richer. Why in 2005 and 2006 were offers ultimately rejected from Oracle based primarily on money, but now Oracle is an evil corporation that can't be trusted with MySQL? Larry's the same guy he was then, Oracle has bought BEA but they don't compete in any way with MySQL, it's the same company. Why would Monty trust Oracle back in 2006 but not now?

Force Oracle to Sell MySQL

This is Monty's solution. And it's cunning. It's particularly cunning that he says repeatedly that the obvious Monty-connected acquirer, Monty Program AB, lacks the funds to do such a purchase. Again, a half-truth.

MySQL was worth $1Bn in early 2008. Since then markets globally have tanked, but MySQL has had some good commercial strength recently within the Sun organization. So let's conservatively say that it's still worth $1Bn. Let's then say that Oracle values the acquisition of Sun highly enough to let MySQL go for less, and do a 20% haircut to $800MM. Who's got that kind of money to acquire?

• Microsoft. You think Stallman and Monty would be happy with that? No.
• IBM. #2 in the database market. Erm, raises same issues that Oracle would.
• Sybase has the market cap (super-recently) but not the cash.
• Red Hat has the market cap, but not the cash.
• Novell lacks the market cap and the cash.
• Computer Associates has the market cap and the cash, but is the place technology goes to die. They also have Ingres to work with.
• VMWare has the market cap and the cash and an acquisitive streak, but would MySQL really fit into their product strategy? I can see Spring driving people to vCloud, but can't even fathom the same kind of strategic benefit for MySQL.
• Symantec has the market cap and the cash, but their storage work has been pretty solidly focused on backup and low-level storage these days.

It doesn't look to me like there are that many companies out there that could really buy MySQL in cash and make Stallman and Monty happy.

But you don't actually need to have the cash yourself: you can use private equity money. It's happened before: BEA was funded by private equity originally to consolidate the Tuxedo market. That's why Monty's protestations ring hollow: his statement is explicitly "we don't have the money." But I think he could probably come up with it, and if he doesn't, then he needs to work with better financiers.

Finally, let's assume that Oracle really wants the rest of Sun, and considers carefully Monty's open statement that Sun is hemorrhaging $100MM of cash per month. Wouldn't it make sense for Oracle to actually just donate MySQL to pretty much anybody to make the EU issue go away? Oh, and lo and behold, Monty has two of those ready to go: Monty Program AB, and the Open Database Alliance.

To me, the current situation amounts to blackmail: we'll keep blocking your acquisition of Sun until you do what we want.

Consider The Sources

So let's look at the motivations of the major current players.

Stallman is irrelevant to any commercial discussion. His press release essentially says "I don't like the GPLv2 anymore, even though I wrote it, and it would be better if MySQL was under the GPLv3." Tough. Furthermore, RMS has no commercial experience of any kind. I fail to see how someone who has never even worked for a profitable commercial enterprise could be considered knowledgeable about how an acquisition would affect the marketplace in an anti-competitive way that harms consumers.

Furthermore, RMS' press release completely belies his previous positions regarding the possibilities for commercialization of GPL projects. He's stated in the past that offering dual licensing is only one of many ways that you can make money with the GPL being the dominant licensing model. Why all of a sudden does he believe that this is the only possibility for MySQL? Why is he so adamant that without that ability, there's no ability to derive commercial revenue from MySQL?

Monty has been slinging FUD about this acquisition for months. He was such a disruptive element inside Sun that they released him from his Non-Compete just to make him go away. Given that he's an extremely rich, disgruntled ex-employee and project founder, he has personal reasons and financial ones (under the Monty Program AB umbrella) to cause as much disruption to this deal as possible.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Monty has been playing a long game here, and I think he'll be obstructive to any potential move that Oracle would make with MySQL until the IP is under his control.

Personal Opinions Should Not Drive Competition Policy

Ultimately, you can sum up the entire argument against the Oracle/Sun acqusition due to the MySQL situation as:

• We don't like Oracle owning the MySQL IP
• Therefore, don't let Oracle own the MySQL IP

Unfortunately, saying that you personally dislike something doesn't provide a valid reason to block an acquisition on competition grounds. Saying that you don't trust Oracle doesn't alter the marketplace in a way that disadvantages customers as a whole. Saying that nobody else could make money by selling commercial licenses for MySQL doesn't mean someone else must be allowed to.

The moment the MySQL founders, who have been handsomely rewarded, took VC money they turned MySQL from being a hobby project/company, and into a major technology company and an asset. The change happened years ago, it's just that they're only starting to wise up now.

But it's happened. It's done. It's no longer anybody's pet project; it's an asset that can and should be used by whomever is willing to pay the most for the IP. As a customer, under the GPLv2, you still have rights, including the right to fork. But don't go whining that a company that made massive amounts of money for its shareholders by commercializing a technology is no longer under your control.

Hardcore Once More

I've mentioned a few times that I've been working on Something Big, and it's time for me to expose myself a little more publicly. It has bearing on the types of things I'll be writing about, so I think it's time to fill in the loyal Kirk's Rants readership.

As most of you know by now, I moved to the UK five and a half years ago after starting my career in Silicon Valley working for pure-technology startups, specializing in the database and web application infrastructure space. When I moved here, I looked at quite a few early-stage technology startups, but ultimately decided to sell out and work in the financial services area. I did this for a few reasons: London at the time wasn't particularly conducive to working in a pure technology startup; financial services were where the Cash Money was at; and I wanted a chance to build a Next Stage for my career. At the time, I felt that working in financial services, given the concentration of financial technology jobs in London, was the right next step for my career.

Over the last few years, I've run the gamut of financial services firms: I started out in charge of the risk management and analytics software for a hedge fund management group; I was in charge of Front Office Technology architecture for a medium-sized derivatives trading group; I worked as a grunt contractor for a Very Big American Bank.

Am I glad I've done it? Most certainly. I've worked with a great group of people, made great friends, and learned a massive amount about how the financial industry actually works. I think it was the right choice for me five and a half years ago. But it's not the right choice for me now.

Since my 6-months at Big Bank B came to an end on Friday, I've taken the Leap of Faith and have co-founded a technology startup. I've joined the circle from Hard Core Startup Geek to Financial Services Sell-Out back to Hard Core Startup Geek.

I can't say precisely what we're doing at this stage, except to say that along the way I've seen a lot of inefficiencies in the way that financial services firms develop software, and I think that we as an industry can do better. I think that financial services are too important to the global economy, and software engineering is too important to modern financial services, to accept the status quo: not only can we do better, but we must do better. Most importantly, I believe that what we as a startup are doing will help.

I'm joined by two exceptional co-founders, and have a network of other technology startups in London that didn't exist a few years ago. As I've written before, London is now a phenomenal location for a technology startup, and what we're doing we couldn't do anywhere else in the world. If you've been on the fence, take the plunge. London is now a fantastic place to do a startup, and this is a fantastic time to do it.

In short, watch this space.

P.S. Maybe I was too entrepreneurial after all.

Some Interactions Are Only Indirectly Profitable

I met with Ari Zilka from Terracotta Technologies yesterday in their offices in San Francisco for a follow-up meeting from a series of meetings I had had with Ari and our sales representative over the course of the past year. My interaction with Terracotta has largely been one of "This technology really is a game-changer; I just have to find my personal game that it changes," and I've been working with Ari ever since on the first entrance path for Terracotta into my company's infrastructure.

Ari's a busy guy. He's a founder and CTO of a software startup, and having been there, I know how difficult it is for him to devote time to anyone. And I've now had three meetings with him over the course of about 9 months. And my employer has not given them a single dollar as of yet, and there's no guarantee that even if we end up rolling into production on top of Terracotta, that my employer will stump up cash to them for an open source technology (FTR, this is the company that inspired the original Open Source Cookies post). This is probably a frustrating situation for the sales guy, because sales guys have numbers and targets and need to make money, and the sales guy needs to dole out his fraction of Ari's time in the way that's going to maximize his commission. I'm clearly not that as of yet. And yet there I was for the third time.

Why?

What's the rationale for his wasting yet more time talking to me?

Having discussed some similar issues with Laura Khalil from Atlassian yesterday when I met with her earlier in the day (more on that meeting anon), I think things started to gel in a more concrete way, because they face these problems as well from a non-Open Source perspective.

The rationale here is that some interactions are only indirectly profitable, but the indirect benefits potentially vastly outweigh the direct ones. So you pursue them anyway if you're an open company; a closed company won't.

Traditional Sales Model
Consider the traditional Enterprise Software (deal supporting direct sales force, or > $100k licensing) sales model:

1. Company sends out feelers to vendors
2. Vendors send representatives
3. Company goes ahead with due diligence/POC with one or more vendors
4. Company starts negotiations
5. Deal is signed
6. All vendors move on

In this model, you have a discrete lifecycle of a particular sale, and most players are only around for the sale; after the cash changes hands, you're into support land, which is at least partially an insurance business. The company projects to the vendors its rough budget, the vendors determine how to maximize their portion of the budget and whether the deal is even worth pursuing. Knowledge is largely gained by the customers interacting directly with the vendors, or maybe checking with some research firms.

Note here that the vendors themselves pull out of the conversation the moment they realize that they don't want the particular deal: it's too small, they're not the right solution, whatever. Then they go back to their closed external appearance, and go back into information embargo. If they can't make a sale, why waste anybody's time on the interaction?

I think any company that thinks this way and is trying to sell to technologists is going to fail and fail hard. And I think split open/closed source companies are best suited to be able to leverage this.

I'm A Bad Customer
For any commercial software company, from a sales perspective, my employer is not their ideal customer. We're not that big for a financial services company (our parent company is, but we have our own technology stack and purchasing departments). We don't buy way more than we need. We don't like shelfware. We like best-of-breed, and don't buy whole software stacks (we will never buy a Service Oriented Architecture Solution). Our technologists are massively involved in sales decisions, even when it's really a business-facing application. We constantly evaluate software in build-vs-buy mentality (and we as a culture like writing software). We're small fry, and we're an expensive (from the vendor's perspective) sale.

But, that being said, we probably are a good candidate for a sale that influences others. We are passionate about technology. We have lots of technical contacts (friends, ex-coworkers) with people at much larger companies. We have people who are involved with lots of online technical communities. We have people who do open source work in their spare time. We have people who blog, both positively and negatively. We go to user groups. We engage vendors constantly on product improvements. We take betas and alphas and developer cuts all the time.

That means that ultimately getting us on your side (even when we don't give you a single dollar in revenue) ends up influencing a lot more people than even a single larger sale would.

So when you look at the overall picture, it starts to make sense for Ari to spend time talking with me, even without a Big Ticket Sale right in front of him. And I think that would be true of any open source technology.

Turn Indirect Profit To Direct Revenue
If you're selling anything commercial having to do with an open source product, I think you'll find that a significant proportion of your most technically savvy users are ones who will never pay you anything. They're working at home; they're in academia; they're smart but working for a poor company; they come from a less developed country. They're a massive source of improvements and knowledge and they get passionate about what they're doing, but they're not going to pay you. But they're a pretty good reason why you'll eventually get revenue from other people: they may go work for a bigger/richer company, or one which prefers Buy in Build-vs-Buy; they talk with the world constantly about what they're doing; they speak at conferences and write books and make your platform far more compelling than it otherwise would be. And so if you want to be successful, you view supporting them and interacting with them as indirectly profitable: no revenue comes from it, but it increases the profit potential of your ecosystem dramatically.

So where's the relevance with Atlassian here? They're not open source. They sell software. How have they leveraged these principles to end up with Laura wasting her time meeting with me?

• They give away licenses all the time. You're open source? Free license (this is how I originally found out about Jira way back in the day). You're working for a non-profit? Free license. You just want to use it for your own personal stuff? Free license. This builds a passionate ecosystem and doesn't stop you extracting revenue from companies that will pay you.
  
• They work with open source programmers. They have a plug-in ecosystem that they actively nurture, and many of those people are doing it open source. Those same passionate people making their ecosystem more attractive and more conducive to extracting revenue from others.
• They engage their customers. Laura knew I'd blog about at least part of what we talked about (that's how she found me in the first place). That increases the sum knowledge that the world has about Atlassian products, and makes for free marketing.
• They differentiate their customers. Some customers are a lot of dumb money, and some customers are a small amount of smart money. I'd like to think my firm is more of the latter, given the amount of time we devote to trying in any way to help make the products we use better.

If you're familiar with the classical Tactical/Strategic Sale quadrant, there are a whole host of people who are so tactically worthless sales wise that they're going to give you nothing. But strategically they're useful. Pursue them.

If you're a technology company and you're trying to play the old closed-information game, the every-interaction-must-be-profitable game, the "no you can't have the manuals unless you're a customer" game, the "no you can't download our whitepapers from a gmail.com email address" game, you're losing out a lot. Engage people who are only indirectly profitable and you'll find more that are directly profitable.

I'm a Relentless Shill for Atlassian

I've been told in the past by work colleagues that I'm a relentless shill for Atlassian products. Currently, we're using most of the suite (JIRA for issue tracking, Clover for Java code coverage, Bamboo for continuous integration, FishEye as a Perforce enhancement). The only piece of shelf-ware we've paid for but haven't rolled out yet is Crowd, because of security issues in our company's IT policies.

Sometimes it seems that I do nothing but try to sell their products, so I wanted to justify quite why I like them so much.

First of all, they produce good products. Each of those products is particularly good in some way, and the fact that they focus on plugin development as well as a single product means that they have an ecosystem which does more than a single product ever could.

Second of all, they integrate well, and so you get network effects by using them together. Also a plus side.

But the main reason why I'm confident in recommending them is that they have an extremely good attitude towards support, and that really matters when you're trying to work with this stuff in a real environment.

Other Companies: Read This. It Matters.

They have an approach to support that I call Extreme Openness. Essentially, as a user (or even prospective user) of their software, you have the level of insight into their internal development processes that you wish you had from even open source projects (where unless you're trolling through the mailing list archives you often can't establish).

For example, the JIRA system that they use to track their own work is publicly accessible. Not only that, you can freely post things in it. For example, I've been quite active in providing bugs and feature enhancement requests. They make all that information available, and I can easily help myself in seeing whether things I've encountered or only dreamed of are on their roadmap, and vote for what I think is important. This gives me an insight into roughly what their priorities are. I may not always agree with them, but at least I'm aware.

It also means that I can see what's forthcoming, up to several releases in advance. This actually meant the difference between our buying a product and not buying it, because we saw that the roadmap involved some features that we wanted. For example, we were evaluating our Continuous Integration technology, and came up with the standard set of contenders (Bamboo, Hudson (which we already used), CruiseControl (which we already used), CruiseControl.NET (which we already used), and TeamCity). We ended up not buying anything, in part because we saw that Bamboo was working on the key feature we needed (remote build agents) and we wanted to wait for its implementation. As soon as they implemented it, we bought the product because it was better than the alternatives. Now we're almost done putting every single project firm-wide into our Bamboo installation.

Contrast this with your general Classic Big Software Company. Maybe you'll drip out bits and pieces of what's forthcoming to key customers, but you definitely won't let all your bugs out into the open like that, and you definitely wouldn't let customers and competitors see what you're working on (and sometimes more importantly, what you're not working on). I like the Atlassian approach quite a bit, because it gives me insight. And if I'm making a commitment to a platform like this, I need to have long-term confidence in it as a platform, and that means insight into development.

To give a contrasting example, SonicMQ comes out with a new release. Did I even know they were working on it? No (and at this point I have a direct line to the head of SonicMQ support for EMEA). Could I easily find out what was in it? No. There're reference notes, but they don't really tell you what's going on. As a customer, did they even email me? No. I found out meeting with the EMEA support manager on a standard meeting that it had come out as he asked me what we thought of it.

Next, you can download all their products and use them in some limited way. No contacting a sales person, no having to hunt for them, you just download them and use them. With SonicMQ, although I'm a customer, in order to get an "official" download of a new release, I have to have my account manager approve our account getting access to a new release, and then it goes through to the worst download manager in the world (including the new Sun JavaSE download web system) and hunt for the downloads that I need. That's rubbish. Atlassian ones are same download no matter what you're going to use, whether eval or paid. I like that a lot.

And they make it really easy to work with their support system, and they're really responsive. They aren't using some archaic system, they aren't making me work with something that makes me rip my hair out. Their system works really well (it's built on JIRA, so they're eating their own dog food), they're fast to respond (although the time zone differences between Sydney and London make for high latency sometimes), and they have proven themselves very intelligent over support channels, and I have no doubt that very often I'm communicating directly with a developer on the product.

Could you scale this up? I think so. Even when I was at BEA working on WebLogic Server, and we had over 50 core developers on the product, we all still did some type of support, we had public downloads of the major products, and while we didn't have public JIRA access, we did announce what features were forthcoming quite a bit and communicated on particular features on public newgroups. Perhaps that's one reason why at the time people liked us.

But you have to support this if you're trying to sell to developers. You have to think of the fact that many of your customers are extremely intelligent (some of them are lesser-skilled, and you have to support them too), and they won't put up with dealing with standard support drones. If your support engineers ever see a script they have to follow, and I sense that, I'm going to do everything in my power to never work with you again.

So if you're planning on starting a software company, let me give you some lessons that you can learn from Atlassian:

• Make it easy (super duper extra easy) for me to download and use your products. Whether I've paid you or not.
• Don't ever stop me from downloading your manuals. Before I even think of installing your software, I'm doing to read your manuals. Cover to cover.
• Open up your processes and let me see what you're working on. I really want to know, and I really want to know in quite depth and detail. Your competitors may find out, but quite frankly, if you're that worried about individual features, you can hide those features themselves. And if your business model requires that nobody knows what you're working on, you're going to fail anyway.
• Have good support. Have excellent support. Make me think that my annual support contract is a bargain. I'm going to pay you, so make me happy I'm paying you.
• Make Good Software.