Sunday, May 31, 2009

Want to know what a really fast MOM system has to handle?

Take a look at what you have to be able to consume if you want to consume live market data from major exchange feeds: April 2009 Capacity Statistics.

These statistics are the aggregate peak message flow on various industry feeds of live market data. In other words, if you want to keep up with the flow, you have to be able to consume at least that many messages per second during peak periods.

The most interesting ones (to me at least) are the ones that are multi-exchange aggregated feeds for options (Siac OPRA and NYSE ArcaBook Options). OPRA hit 869,109 mps peak in April, and NYSE ArcaBook Options hit 565,522 mps peak. If you want to consume all the major feeds listed in one box, you'd need to be able to handle more than 2MM mps.[1] That's a lot of individual messages for any software-only product to handle.

Yet another reason why I believe systems like Tervela and Solace are going to be key to the next generation of market feed aggregation: at levels like that you need something hardware accelerated in order to handle the first round of aggregation. Furthermore, using AMQP (which both currently have, or at least have plans for), you can then integrate your favorite second-tier tick distribution system (RabbitMQ, qPid, 29West [2]). Ingress handling hardware feeds to egress handling software. [3] Who says you have to choose?

Footnotes

[1]: Yes, I know you wouldn't, because they peak at different times of the day, and there is overlap, particularly between the ArcaBook and Siac feeds.
[2]: I know they're a member of the working group, but I can't see anything explicit about AMQP support on their web site as of yet, so I presume it's forthcoming.
[3]: Assuming you don't just want to go hardware-only end-to-end, which is the approach that BarCap is taking for example.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Monty Bites The Hand That Fed Him: Part 2

(Take a look at Part One of my Monty-Watch for some background as to what I think about the situation).

So Monty Widenius and Peter Zaitsev did an interview with Matthew Aslett on the creation of the Open Database Alliance. It's well worth a read.

For the record, I don't want anybody to conflate my opinions on what Monty's done with anybody else associated with the Open Database Alliance. I actually think that having such an organization ex-Oracle to make sure that there's a unified voice for everybody working (and attempting to make money) from the MySQL ecosystem, outside the current corporate owner of the MySQL brand, is a Good Thing (and something I think other projects with a single major corporate sponsor may lead to in the future). As such, having a place for all the various consultancies and technology providers to work together to ensure their interests are looked after is a pretty useful and innovative thing.

However, let's play "Look At The Balls On That Guy"!

Actual Quote Time:

I have, however, offered Oracle a partnership with Monty Program Ab, under which Oracle could get access to some of the critical developer resources Monty Program Ab has available. Monty Program Ab could also help Oracle with their open source strategy and serve as a ‘trust creating’ entity between Oracle and the open source developer community. Oracle has however not yet responded to this.

Kirk's Translation:

I have hired all of the people that ever worked for me when I stormed off from Sun in a huff. Now you may have the MySQL brand name and core IP, but I have all the engineers. Furthermore, I've been sowing as much FUD as I possibly can when, quite frankly, you haven't done anything directly to harm the interests of the MySQL community. If you want me to publicly step down from the FUD-slinging, I have a bank account to which you can send some [more] money.

Anyone who doubts the actual motivations of Monty's recent efforts should read the real quotation (as well as my translation). I think it speaks volumes about what he's attempting to achieve here, which is quite simply to spread enough FUD about Oracle's relationship to MySQL that Oracle feels like it has to engage in some type of action to bring Monty back into the fold in some form, which would involve some type of cash money payment. There really is no other conclusion possible for someone who says, in no uncertain terms: I have all the core developers; I've damaged your relationship with the core community; You could pay me and make the problems go away.

Friday, May 15, 2009

How Many Times Can Monty Sell MySQL?

UPDATE 2009-05-27: Monty's spoken to Matt Aslett, and I've responded.

COMMENTARY UPDATE 2009-05-27: If you're just reading this for the first time, after posting this it became clear (through back-channel to me) that Sun did have Monty under an Non-Compete, and chose to allow Monty to get out of it. I've commented about that in the comments [which you should really read] and in the Proggit thread. I still think Monty's actions are pretty bad looking even given that, but you should understand that there was a Non-Compete, and Monty was let out of it by Sun, before you read the original article below.

I've been thinking this since it was announced, but Monty's current attempt to monetize MySQL by hamstringing the eventual owner of his original attempt is really quite, ahem, ballsy. For a much less ranty analysis with quotes from M-Dawg himself, see Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk's writeup.

Let me give the Kirk "worked for 3 database companies and founded one expressly to compete with MySQL" Wylie synopsis:

  • Monty writes MySQL way back in the day, largely so that he has a database system which doesn't have any of the complex features of an RDBMS that make it work well (you know, referential integrity, transactions, views, proper metadata support).
  • People start using it, largely because it's Free-as-in-Beer (this was back in the days of minimum $100K Oracle buys just to run a simple web site), but also because it's easy to setup and administer (which Oracle/Sybase/SQLServer/DB2 were not).
  • Monty wants to get rich.
  • In an effort to get rich, he takes a boat load of VC funding to push MySQL from being a small open source collective to a Real Company.
  • VC funding requires a business model that has real revenue behind it.
  • Company adopts a split licensing model (which pissed off a lot of people at the time), and starts being effective in attracting revenue and very, very smart people as executives.
  • Monty's dreams of success are realized when Sun pays a king's ransom for MySQL.
  • Monty wants to have his cake [1] and eat it too, and gets all pissy and storms off in a strop and founds an attempt to get rich a second time on the same project.
  • Oracle buying Sun means people take this attempt even more seriously and he attracts people who never liked the post-VC-funding MySQL business model in the first place to the cause.

So here's the question that everybody should have on their minds: How many times will Monty attempt to get rich off the same project? [2]

Now I wasn't privy to any of the contractual arrangements around MySQL's incorporation, or his common stock stake, or the Sun buyout, or any of his employment agreements [3]. I will, however, postulate that if Monty doesn't have Fuck You money at this point given a $1Bn buyout of the firm he founded, he did something Seriously Wrong, and you probably shouldn't trust his business instincts.

So one of two things is going on here:

  • f(Cake + Eating) == Cake
  • He fundamentally doesn't agree with a split licensing model and thinks it's doomed to failure. I really hope this isn't the case, because if it is, he was acting disingenuously at best when working for the Original Monty MySQL-Based Get Rich Scheme, by supporting a model that he didn't believe in.

If it's the latter, why did he start down the path of taking VC money in the first place? Seriously, did he honestly believe that he could take a boat-load of risk capital, and not have to provide returns to the limited partners at the core of any risk capital facility? Did he lose some type of boardroom squabble over the direction of MySQL and has been nursing a grudge ever since? [4]

Here's something any founders of Open Source projects need to realize: VC money comes with strings attached; do not take that money if you don't want to take the strings. The strings are entirely financial: VC/risk capital requires a very hefty payout in a relatively short (5-10 years max) timeframe to the limited partners who provided the VC firm with its capital to invest. In order to ramp up revenues in a reasonable timeframe, you will need to have some facility to generate reproducible, cheap-to-deliver revenue in that timeframe. Open Core is one approach, Split Licensing is another, all manner of Services are a third, there are a whole host. But you have to come up with one. Otherwise there's no point in raising risk capital, which must have a hefty payout.

If you just want to have a lifestyle business (and many lifestyle businesses can, over time, still provide you with Fuck You money if you structure them properly), while constantly maintaining an environment where you can do what you want technically in a purely-Libre environment, don't take risk capital. Grow your business organically, and enjoy the life that you've created for yourself.

But the moment you accept that term sheet, you've crossed the barrier beyond a pure hacker coding for fun, and a company executive who must deliver returns to his investors (and that may require doing things that the hacker side of you finds distasteful). If you're not willing to sign up to the transition between pure Open Source techie and Business Executive, don't accept the term sheet. And for the love of the FSM's noodly appendage, don't accept the term sheet thinking that you're going to screw your investors in the long term by going back to your roots once you've got your payout. [5] Doing so screws it for the rest of us.

Here's the #1 problem Monty's move has caused for anyone attempting to make Fuck You money off Open Source: it should make VCs very nervous indeed about Open Source investments. Let's examine what I would consider to be a logical thought process:

  • If we invest in an Open Source company, the most likely outcome is an acquisition by another firm.
  • If founders of projects make it a habit of storming off to fork their invention because they don't like the monetization model they helped establish, other firms are very unlikely indeed to buy Open Source companies.
  • If other companies are unlikely to buy Open Source companies, our return on investment in them will be much lower.
  • Therefore, there's no point in looking at them.

None of this impacts Monty: he presumably already has his Fuck You money.

But if I were a VC looking to invest in an Open Source company, I would insist on an enforceable non-compete if I could [6], and I would make sure that my exits prevented the founders from being able to fork. Otherwise, my assets are really only there to make the founders enough money that they can pursue their dream of working on pure Open Source code with enough money that they no longer have to try to get rich. Which is great for them, but not for the rest of us who aren't rich but wish we were.

Remember: going for the brass ring and taking VC money requires that you compromise something. If you don't like it, don't take the money. But once you have, realize that you may need to walk away from your baby once you've got the money for the sake of everybody else.

Just as an aside, bear in mind that nothing should stop you from doing Open Source work, including starting an entirely new project on the same basic idea, once you have your payoff. It happens all the time in other industries (how many networking hardware companies have been founded by the exact same executives?). But resist the urge to fork your original project. It's unseemly at best, and flat-out unethical at worst. If Monty had started MariaDB from scratch, that would be one thing. But he didn't. And that's the thing that makes this all seem, well, just a little bit wrong to me.

Footnotes

[1]: By cake, I mean chedda/dead presidents/papa. Cash money, yo.
[2]: Clearly more than once.
[3]: Hence I am totally unqualified to comment here. I'm doing so anyway, because if you keep reading, this turns less Monty-directed and more general-parable.
[4]: There's a reason nobody ever saw the code for my Compete-with-MySQL Open Source Database startup.
[5]: I'm not actually accusing Monty of this, and nor do I believe it to be the case (believe it or not). I think there's something else going on here. But I could see that some people might think that unethically, and you really shouldn't.
[6]: Yes, there are ways to structure this, usually during the M&A stage, by having deferred payments to the founders which don't trigger if they fork for some period of time, that even comply with California and UK restraint-of-trade law.