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SpringSource Acquires Hyperic, Possibly Set to Target Microsoft and IBM
Many sources are reporting that SpringSource has acquired Hyperic, creating a company that could go after IBM and Microsoft. SpringSource has long dreamed of being able to offer a complete open source solution that accelerates the entire build, run, manage Java application lifecycle, and Hyperic offers the last piece of the puzzle. "Regardless, the SpringSource/Hyperic combination creates a clear and present danger to IBM and Microsoft, two companies that have largely stood alone in the ability to build, run, and manage applications. It's also a significant boon to companies looking to open source to save money and improve productivity. Is it a sign of good things to come from not only SpringSource, but also open source, generally? Time will tell, but I suspect we're on the cusp of an aggressive and ambitious new phase in open-source competition."
Are you kidding? SpringSource is _THE_ standard IoC container for the Java Language. Their ideas have influenced a wide ranging array of Java-based products including hibernate (http://hibernate.org), google guice (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/), apache tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org), just to name a few. Just because you aren't familiar with these technologies does not mean this is not a pretty big deal. Aside from that, the spring source company has successfully built a profitable company around their open source technologies while still providing the source freely to the community. Their influence can hardly be understated even if you have never used on their technologies directly. http://www.springsource.com/customers
Spring is already open source. It's a very widely used Java web application framework - possibly the king of that particular hill. That's why it's used in hundreds of companies, as the article states.
I'm also sure it's pretty fast in terms of performance.
The proprietary piece here is Hyperic, not Spring.
But you and the other post-writers are right, it's still a long way from being noteworthy to IBM or Microsoft. Too many big companies insist on proprietary software from big name vendors, regardless of the technical or financial merits of cheaper competition (open source or otherwise).
Considering that Spring is under the Apache 2.0 license, and Java is now GPL'd, it's not like they hold the exclusive "keys to the kingdom." There's more to life and computers than Java.
Hyperic is a GPLed monitoring solution sorta akin to Nagios. I use it to give me my monitoring for my Linux & Windows servers, but also it runs queries against our data vendor's database to ensure that the database is responsive.
I inherited it, which was the first time I ran across it, but after using it I'm a big convert. I recommend taking a serious look at it.
As to the takeover, well, I doubt it'll affect me one way or the other.
It's a very widely used Java web application framework
Uh, that's not exactly right - Spring is primarily an IoC container and AOP framework, and a whole bunch of (mostly unrelated) frameworks built on top of those. SpringMVC/WebFlow is one of those components, probably one of the less successful ones at that, as it's not obviously better than its competitors (not necessarily worse, just not better - most modern MVC web frameworks are nigh-identical at this point).
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm not getting defensive about SpringSource. I just hate when all the comments are by people making definitive statements about things they know jack about. The attitude "I never heard of it so it must be nothing" is just retarded. One comment even called it vaporware! This stuff is already out there. SpringSource just bought a component already used by them so they could control the whole end-to-end solution. Other clueless commenters are interpreting the summary to mean that SpringSource is going to wipe out IBM and Microsoft. This is about the application framework market not MS or IBM as a whole. It doesn't take a whole lot of reading to figure that out.
Time makes more converts than reason
2. Who the hell is Hyberic?
Hyperic is a company that makes a product called Hyperic HQ which is used to monitor applications/services/servers much like Nagios or HP OpenView Operations. It can monitor using SNMP or by an installed Hyperic HQ agent (java-based) on a server. The agents are capable of detecting, using platform-dependent APIs, the number of CPUs, hard drives, network interfaces, memory, network settings, etc. as well as certain enterprise-level applications such as databases, application servers, etc. If using the Hyperic agent, metrics about the system and its applications are sent to the Hyperic HQ server every 5 minutes. SNMP data is sent either by polling (configured interval) or by traps whose frequency is of course based on the device generating them. Historical views of a system's/application's status can then be viewed and alerts can be generated based on various thresholds (e.g. availability % drops below 99% for more than 2 minutes). The Hyperic site has already been updated. They have both a pay and a free version. Both are open source I believe. Go to their site for more info.
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