SpikeSource, SourceLabs Launch Supported Open Source Stacks

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

What Linux has done for operating systems, a stack of open source programs can do for middleware--provided someone has pre-integrated, pretested, and packaged that software together and is prepared to provide technical support for that software as the commercial Linux distributors started doing in the mid-1990s. Yes, that was a decade ago, and yes, it should not have taken us this long to get here. But get here we did, now that SpikeSource and SourceLabs have launched their respective services.

SpikeSource was very busy last week. The company, which is based in Redwood City, California, rolled out its vision of certified stacks, its first actual products, and joined Open Source Development Labs.

SpikeSource was founded in May 2003 by Kim Polese, one of the top people on Sun Microsystems' Java team. Prior to founding SpikeSource, Polese was CEO of patch management software maker Marimba. After quitting his job as president of database maker Oracle and becoming a general partner at Silicon Valley venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, Ray Lane took a shining to SpikeSource. (Hmmm, I wonder why? To give former employer Larry Ellison a little trouble? No. That couldn't be it. . . ). After backing SpikeSource, Lane became its chairman.

The company has a very broad and deep concept of the kinds of commercial software stacks that it believes commercial customers will pay money to support. (Remember, this is mostly open source software, and even the certified stacks that SpikeSource creates can be downloaded for free.) What you pay for is technical and patch support and the constant recertification of the stack as the 50 components of the SpikeSource Core Stack keep changing as open source projects move along.

In December 2004, SpikeSource went into beta for two particular stacks of software, which it calls LAMP and LAMJ. That was short for Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/Python/PHP and Linux-Apache-MySQL-Java. SpikeSource said then that it planned to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Red Hat 9, and Fedora Core 1, and Novell SUSE 9 Linux variants. The LAMJ stack includes Tomcat, JBoss, Hibernate, and Axis.

What SpikeSource actually announced as a single thing, called SpikeSource Core stack, is seven preconfigured software stacks with over 50 different components and using six different development languages. You can download the Core Stack at www.spikesource.com/sitemgr/downloads.php. RHEL 3, Fedora Core 1, and SUSE 9 are supported, as promised, but so are Fedora Core 3 and SUSE 9.1 in the generally available release. SpikeSource is also making a Windows stack, called WAMP, which is now available as an alpha release.

SpikeSource's update service for the Core Stack is in beta, and will be available for $295 per year. Basic installation support for the stack has a 48-hour maximum response time and spans a 30-day installation period, for which SpikeSource is charging $795. This installation support is available now, and it also includes a full year of access to SpikeSource's knowledge base. Soon, SpikeSource will combine these two offerings into a single service, appropriately called "the update service and installation bundle", and will charge $995 for this bundle, providing one year of both installation and update support with a 9 percent discount off the individual prices of these services. The combined service also has another nice feature: You get 24-hour response time on service calls. If you want commercial-grade support that covers more than installation issues, you have to buy the silver annual support contract, which costs $10,000 a year and includes online issue reporting and 30 support incidents per year across the whole stack. With the gold annual support contract for the SpikeSource Core stack, you can report incidents online or get direct telephone support with a four-hour turnaround time. For $25,000 a year, you get 50 support incidents.

SpikeSource may have been the first mover in commercializing the Apache-MySQL-PHP stack as if it were a single, integrated product, but it is by no means going to be the only player in this market. The same week that SpikeSource made its announcements, competitor SourceLabs launched the first of what will eventually be many certified middleware stacks.

SourceLabs, which is based in Seattle, has launched what it calls the AMP stack, which obviously is short for Apache, MySQL and PHP. Notice there is no "L" in that abbreviation. That is because SourceLabs has aspirations that are larger than Linux alone and will eventually launch a Windows version of the stack. (It seems very likely that Unix variants will also be available, since there are millions of Unix servers installed in the world and plenty of people like Unix better than Linux or Windows.) The AMP stack was launched last week, and it includes Apache 1.3.33, MySQL 4.1.9, and PHP 5.0.3. It has been certified to run on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 and the raw Linux kernel at the 2.4.21-27 release. SourceLabs is working on Windows 2000 and Windows XP next, and will probably get Windows 2003 out the door before Solaris Unix or other Linuxes come online. Pricing for the support for the stacks is not yet available, and SourceLabs did not return phone calls prior to our going to press. If you want to play around with the software, you can do so at www.sourcelabs.com/AMPstack.htm.

SourceLabs was founded in September 2004 by three former colleagues from commercial middleware supplier BEA Systems. Specifically: Byron Sebastian, CEO and formerly general manager of the WebLogic product; Will Pugh, chief architect and formerly the technologist for BEA and a former Microsoft employee; and Cornelius Willis, vice president of sales and marketing and formerly in the same role at BEA promoting open source initiatives (including the Beehive Project) and a former product manager of Microsoft's Visual Basic product line. Sebastian hooked up with Brad Silverberg, the former chief of Microsoft's Windows division who made Windows 95 and Microsoft's Internet strategy happen--and made himself fabulously rich in the process--and got venture funding from Silverberg's Ignition Partners. Danny Rimer, a managing director at Hambrecht and Quist who was the main underwriting analyst for Amazon, Checkpoint, Netscape, and Verisign in the dot-com boom and who has more recently invested in MySQL and Zend Technologies, the entities behind the commercialized versions of the MySQL database and the PHP programming language.