The answer is simple: VMware sees the writing on the wall, it knows acting like a dictator won’t work in an IT society that craves democracy. Half of the story around VMware’s rumored cloud computing spin-out focused on the need for the company to focus on its core virtualization business in order to fend off advances from the likes of Microsoft, Citrix, OpenStack and others. Most experts agree that embracing those competitors is VMware’s best chance to blunt their attacks.

On July 2, VMware announced it was buying virtualization- and cloud-management vendor DynamicOps, which VMware rationalized in its press release thusly:

VMware believes that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture, but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management. … DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by enabling customers to consume multi-cloud resources (e.g., physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2).

On Monday, it was software-defined networking golden boy Nicira. In his blog post explaining the acquisition, VMware CTO Steve Herrod goes out of his way to talk about openness:

They [Nicira] are major contributors to the networking capabilities of other hypervisors (via the Open vSwitch community) as well as to the “Quantum Project”, one of the key subsystems of OpenStack.

I can imagine skepticism as to whether we will continue this substantial embrace of non-VMware hypervisors and clouds. Let me be clear in this blog… we are absolutely committed to maintaining Nicira’s openness and bringing additional value and choices to the OpenStack, CloudStack, and other cloud-related communities.

VMware’s Herrod and I talking software-defined data centers at Structure.

It might sound counterintuitive that VMware would embrace the hypervisor and cloud-management competition, but it’s actually common sense. If VMware is going to position itself as the provider of intelligence in software-defined data centers, hypervisors have to be treated as the workers that merely carry out the management layer’s commands. If all they’re there to do is create virtual machines that are part of a resource pool, the hypervisor shouldn’t really matter.

If we’re talking about supporting multiple cloud environments, such as OpenStack and CloudStack, I have to assume VMware will simply claim its superiority. So it might not prevent people from using OpenStack for test-dev workloads and web sites, but it will make the case that customers will want to use VMware for mission-critical apps.

Supporting multiple clouds doesn’t mean encouraging their use. It’s the same logic that underpins VMware’s efforts with CloudFoundry — developers are free to use whatever components they want, but writing in Java and using Spring means VMware support and access to the gamut of SpringSource tools such as Spring Hadoop and everything falling under the vFabric banner. Want to run Hadoop on your VMs? You might be interested in VMware’s efforts to make Hadoop run on its vSphere hypervisor.

But don’t mistake VMware’s newfound love of openness for a sign incredible vision. If anything, it’s reactionary. In a world where the alternatives — even Microsoft — all play increasingly nice with each other, VMware can’t afford to be the odd man out. And in this case, what’s good for VMware should be good for customers, too.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Chris Howey.

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Technologically, Database.com should be very familiar to anyone that has used Salesforce.com. As Gordon Evans, senior director of public relations, told me in an email, it’s the “same infrastructure that powers our Salesforce apps and Force.com platform, now available as a standalone service.” What’s new, however, is the “social data model” designed to handle things like feeds, status updates and user profiles, and development kits for everything from Java to iOS to Windows Azure. Furthermore, as Evans clarified, “Database.com can serve as the database for any cloud application connected to the Internet.”

But it’s the openness – or the choice, at least – that’s the real story here. If developers are willing to commit to Database.com as the data layer, they can have their choice as to what types of applications they run and atop which clouds they run them. It’s not the Promised Land of true interoperability for which openness advocates are calling, but early on, at least, we’ll have to live with proprietary innovation in cloud computing. That makes choice the best alternative to true openness.

Oh, and Database.com marks the fulfillment of Marc Benioff’s suggestion last month that he would democratize databases in the cloud. The suggestion seemed strange at the time considering how only Salesforce.com CRM customers and Force.com developers could access the company’s database infrastructure, but, clearly, Benioff had a plan in place. Part of democratization is a low price, and with free introductory pricing and $10-per-month increments for additional users and usage tiers, pricing shouldn’t prove too big a hindrance.

Where Database.com might suffer is for webscale applications requiring NoSQL tools to handle massive scale and mountains of unstructured data, but no product can be everything to everyone.

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A Google employee expressed his distaste for the way Apple does business in no uncertain terms in a recent blog post. Tim Bray, a co-inventor of XML and a well-known blogger in his own right, is also a Google employee on the Android team, having recently joined following his time at Sun Microsystems.

The blog post at issue, which appeared on his personal blog, details his reasons behind joining Google, which include a passion for the rapid pace of development on the platform and the fact that it’s an open source system. Another reason is that he “hates” the iPhone. Or at least the context in which the iPhone operates.

Bray doesn’t shy away from sharing his opinion of what Apple’s done wrong with the iPhone, in no uncertain terms:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

Even though I wasn’t sad to see Apple nix a whole host of “sexy” apps recently, I can’t help but agree with where Tim Bray is coming from. Apple is effectively packaging and selling back to us a polished and pristine version of what we used to have only free and unfettered access to. Giving them too much control might start to inhibit our ability to continue to have that free access.

I’m not sure handing the reins to Google won’t have the exact same effect in the long run, but that isn’t what will happen if some people side with them in this developing conflict. Luckily, unlike in professional sports, there doesn’t have to be a winner in clashes between mobile device makers. A healthy balance should keep the power of both in check.

Arguments about exactly what an open technology strategy is, compared to a closed one, have of course been raging for years. In the open source community, the Free Software Definition explicitly states that truly free software means “free as in speech, not free as in beer.” It further explicitly states that freeware — software applications that you or I can use without paying — differs from true open-source software, the source code of which we can view and change.

Rosenberg’s open manifesto goes well beyond the concept of open-source software, however, tackling open standards, the value of an open Internet and the very concept of open information overall. He writes:

“To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors…Open systems are just the opposite.”

While Google is far from perfectly open in every aspect of its business, it is one of the largest contributors of free, open-source code, and the company does indeed do transformative things through open efforts. The best and most recent example would be the enormous success that Google’s open-source Android platform has become. There are nearly 20 Android handsets from major manufacturers, and the OS is spreading out to non-phone devices.

Let’s not get snookered here, though. Although Google has contributed Android’s code to the open source community, the company wants Android and applications that run on top of it to steer as many users as possible into Google’s own, lucrative search-and-ad ecosystems. That ecosystem is not entirely open, nor are the details on personal habits and information that Google collects entirely transparent.

One thing I really liked about Rosenberg’s essay was that he basically comes right out and ‘fesses up to all of this. “Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic,” he writes.

There you have it. I don’t question Google’s commitment to openness across many of its efforts (though not all), but I don’t believe for a second that Google approaches the concept of openness absent self-interest. Make no mistake: Google serves openness because openness serves Google.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Cane Rosso.

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