How are things going here at Java 1 for you? Things are going good. You know, this show, there's a lot of different types of people. This is a very developer-oriented show, right? And so, I wouldn't say that our target customer, this is their kind of show necessarily, since we cater to more of an operational audience. However, because we have this really sweet plug-in development kit and the fact that our product is built on J2EE, and we happen to have a really, really good management story for Java in general, we're sort of, you know, it's a good spot for us. But it's hard to beat the PlayStation 3 and the Blu-ray discs behind us. You know, one of the things that I really like you guys have is the whole cigar thing. Have you found people being interested in that? Tons. Actually, you know, the reception of the cigar, which is kind of a rather esoteric piece of our software, because it has no face. We have this really cool GUI and this kind of very user-oriented approach to doing management. Cigar is the kernel of our product, and it's our way of beating the difficulty of having to manage different operating systems and architectures using a single API. And luckily, we found that a lot of people have adopted cigar on its own. Yeah. And used it, you know, for different projects, both Java and non-Java related. Because you have it GPL. Yeah, and it's GPL. And in fact, one of the coolest things that happened recently, which I don't know if we had even mentioned, we got a gentleman in Europe who signed up to build a JMX framework around cigar. So that cigar -- you know, cigar for us runs inside the container. So now you can run cigar and have it expose JMX objects directly. Yeah, yeah. That's nice. So in addition to the Java API that it already has, it now is kind of a JMX aware piece on its own. And we hadn't done that only because we always run it inside of HQ, which is already JMX aware. But yeah, so that's -- Doug's really excited about that.
2:02We got, you know, this guy out in Europe. I forget his name. I think he's in Austria. Right. Really smart dude. Writes great. Relative to cigar. Originally, when we picked the GPL, you know, the -- no exceptions based GPL V2, it was partly motivated around our interest in having this very, very sophisticated piece of technology that we have built and nurtured over many years and have, in fact, licensed to other people like MySQL. Yeah, we owe him it. Yeah. So who else is distributing it then? I mean, you mentioned MySQL. MySQL is using it, and then MuleSource is using it, and JBoss is using it as part of the JBoss operations network. Yeah. You guys are kind of like the instrumenters for the open source company world. That's right. That's right. So this week we've been talking to Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun, and his take is that it's not about the license anymore. Yep. That if it's open source, that means co-creation. True. If it's not co-creation, it's not open source. He's almost trying to redefine it. It's about co-creation rather than some of the earlier approaches that we took saying, oh, it's open source because the OSI says so. Right. So the co-creation thing, I mean, I'm not so sure about a rigid definition in the way he's put it, but certainly it helps your credibility, and any time you see community activities, you think actually that's something I want to associate with. I know I've written about this in the past, but I think that this whole quest for the one true definition of open source is about silliness and vendors in a competitive space saying, oh, you know, you can't sell software and call yourself open source because you have to be a services owner. That's bullshit. Yeah, exactly. Every possible story that you can think of, I've heard. And, you know, we picked the GPL, and we're also the cash register of open source, which I'm pretty proud of. And, you know, it's -- well, in the cash register, I'll qualify it. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, it's one of you saying it's okay to make money. I'll qualify it because -- Well, because management's a great upsell for open source companies, right? Absolutely. So open source companies partner with us, license our technology, and are able to create monetizable, scalable monetizable offerings, similar to what JBoss and MuleSource and many other folks have done.
4:05Is it like the Wiley of open source, maybe? You know, in part, I think there's -- you know, Wiley -- you mean Wiley now CA, of course. Yeah. There's a big part of what we do that has a lot of cross-similarities to Wiley. There's a lot of other things. Wiley's audience is different. Interscope's a -- such a deep dive, a depth-oriented product. Very, very deep implementation. Yeah. And we try to go as deep as we possibly can while appealing to the paranoia of the successful operations team. Right. A successful ops person is a paranoid ops person who is resistant to change. Absolutely. Is typically not keen on deploying random stuff, for lack of a better term. And it's also looking for the -- you know, what can I blame here? Like, my outage, like, what did I change? How can I get home, right? Exactly. Exactly. So -- Hopefully, if you're drunk, you're on autopilot, right? So, it's a different mentality than Wiley and the application visibility and the whole transaction instrumentation and all that kind of stuff. I mean, from my perspective, the similarity would be -- I mean, they did a very, very good job of working with the application server vendors in the last wave. Yep. So, you know, absolutely nailing the relationship with BEA, absolutely nailing the relationship with IBM, moving forward like that. And I think what you're doing is nailing the relationships with the open source players. Right. Yeah. And it's a great opportunity. And even through that, like, we get this effect today at the show that people that are aware of our product because of, you know, J Boss On or because of Mule HQ. And they look at it, right? And they see the same kind of graphs and, you know, maybe the skin's a little different and the coloring is a little different. And, you know, these OEM partners of ours have been able to license and create additional capabilities on top of what we already have, which is great, right? Because that means that, you know, they can go deep and specialize within a particular stack. And are some of them bringing code back as well? Absolutely. MySQL, in fact, has contributed a lot of very interesting code into Cigar and motivated us because their management solution is not -- built on Java. It's actually -- their agent is native.
6:06They've contributed a lot of very interesting additional native capabilities around Cigar. They've also asked us to take pieces of Cigar that were previously in the Java layer and actually push them down, like the process table query language stuff. Right. The thing that we used to fingerprint different products and applications. That was actually coded at the Java layer. And then because MySQL really, really wanted to use it and they didn't have -- you know, they weren't using the Java interface for it, we went back and essentially pushed that down into it. Now, interestingly enough, I think Cigar belongs in the Java runtime personally, right? Right. I think we've talked about that. We have. We have. And as far as how that process can take place, well, the first thing was for us to, you know, open source technology. Yeah, open source code in the market will decide. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, actually when -- because I think we talked about that before they -- before they announced it. Yeah, before Java was even open source. The GPL thing. And it was nice. That was one of the first things I thought when they said they were going to choose the GPL. I was like, oh, well, what nice compatibility. Yep. And there's been JSR projects that have -- Have you seen any action around Glassfish at all? I haven't. I mean, nobody's -- it's a little similar to Geronimo. We haven't really gotten a lot of requests for some of these, you know, other app servers, other containers. The majority of the interest that we hear, you know, JBoss remains very popular, of course, and we're big fans. Right. Also, you know, things like Spring. We're doing actually some really cool stuff with Groovy and Grails. Yeah, yeah. For our future products. And so, you know, there's a lot of innovation happening. And that's great. And I think the container wars -- I don't want to say that they're over, but it's kind of not as exciting to go and argue. Right, right. Yeah. And WASCE is popular, and they're getting a lot of embedding partners, people like Intaglio that are doing work on WASCE, et cetera. Right, right. And we can -- the problem we have with Geronimo is that there's no instrumentation, no manageability really baked into it.
8:09Right. And we've talked to IBM about it. We've talked to the Geronimo team directly about it. Everybody recognizes that it needs to be done, but no one's -- we're not going to do it, because we've got a company and a product to build. So we might have to pay for that. Yeah. Maybe -- yeah. And you look at web -- well, actually, and the great example there is JBoss, because JBoss, even in two -- JBoss 2, like one of the first, you know, real production usable versions of JBoss had, just tons of built-in JMX instrumentation. Very aggressive about instrumentation. Yeah. Yeah. And Mark Flurry wrote a book on the -- It was almost too much. Yeah. It was almost like a science experiment. You know, ridiculous instrumentation. Yeah. And that's actually really good. And one of the things that -- on the inverse side, and this is one of the parts about open source that's a little difficult, is you have this community that's pushing a product very quickly, right? But then you have the enterprises that are consuming it that don't move nearly as quickly, that get kind of their feet caught on things like, oh, from version 3.2.5 to version 3.2.6, we changed the capitalization in all the M beans. And so now, if you're consuming any of this data, it's broken. Yeah, yeah.