Decidedly, this is the acquisition season. After Oracle buying BEA it is now the time for VMWare to acquire SpringSource. I wonder what VMWare gets from this acquisition and different from a partnership with SpringSource and the only thing that I can think of is the exclusivity of selling certain types of higher-value virtual machines.
To make this more clear: VMWare probably has a cloud offering, similar to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud offering. EC2 has started by selling bare-bones images and moved onto selling higher-value images, also known as Amazon Machine Images (the idea is that you could sell/make available your software - application server, database, content management server, etc… - as an Amazon image and charge per usage for the use of the original Amazon image + the use of your application). It is possible that VMWare will move onto selling higher-value virtual machines thru its cloud offering as well. Now that VMWare has acquired SpringSource it is very likely that they will start selling enterprise virtual machines equiped with all the packages present in SpringSource’s portfolio (which also includes some higher-value packages such as Spring Batch, Spring Integration, etc…). As SpringSource is now under VMWare I would not be very surprised if VMWare will get the exclusivity of providing enterprise, Spring-enabled, higher-value virtual machines (apparently this is not the case, check below). Not sure if it is feasible, but VMWare could even adapt Spring’s higher-value packages into specialized virtual machines (for example , a virtual machine running Spring Batch fine-tuned for batching needs).

If this happens it could happen that VMWare will become the premier hosting service for cloud-deployed enterprise Java applications and for specialized, Java-powered, cloud-deployed enterprise services. If the cloud is the future of application hosting (frankly, I would not bet the farm on it) then VMWare will be the hub where Java applications will be hosted (the difference between hosting a Spring application with VMWare and with a different cloud provider would be the difference between a virtual machine specialized for running Spring applications and an all-purpose virtual machine. This difference in the efficiency of hosting a Spring application would drive more users to VMWare’s clouds).

Still, 420 million dollars is a pretty big sum of money, especially in the current economic climate, and we will have to see if VMWare and SpringSource will find the synergies which will make them pairing together more than the sum of their parts.

Congratulations to Rod Johnson, Adrian Colyer, Juergen Hoeller and the rest of the Spring team and all the best to VMWare and SpringSource!!

Later edit: It looks like you can buy Spring-images on Amazon’s Cloud thru a company called Cloud Foundry which was acquired by SpringSource. I am still trying to figure out why VMWare bought Spring Source rather than entering a licensing agreement with them. I guess we have to wait and see.

Later edit: According to Adrian Colyer this is the future of how Java applications will be deployed. Still, I don’t buy into the cloud hype, I think that for the near future cloud adoption will be determined mostly by prices for different pieces of hardware. Maybe at one point there will be a difference in the efficiency of managing applications deployed in a cloud versus the ones deployed outside which would compensate for the differences in price of hosting an instance locally or on the cloud, but I don’t think we are near this point.

I have been reading lately A History of Economics: The Past as the Present by John Kenneth Galbraith and one of its main ideas, namely that economic concepts are the product of the times and societies they are born rather than the other way around, made me look at the concept of copyright from a different perspective.

The copyright concept is tied to the ability to make copies: when this ability did not exist (such as prior to the phonograph) or was severely impaired (such as during the vinyl era) the concept of copyright did not exist because there was no need for it. Copyright appeared when music recording moved to a medium which allowed for music to be copied easily enough for music buyers to make their own copies (roughly around the introduction of the compact cassette), hence the introduction of the right to copy. In the current environment characterized by very low copy costs and very inefficient means of enforcing rights to owning a copy you could say that the concept of copyright is living its last moments.

Copyright may appear to future historians as a concept which lasted for a period of time during which the ability to copy content was both developed enough to worry content creators and distributors about people getting content without paying for it and at the same time it was under-developed enough to allow the content creators and distributors to develop mechanisms for controlling content copies. Once the ability to copy and share content became  utiquitous the right to a copy of content ceased to exist as the means of enforcing this right started to weaken.

The question that is posed quite frequently is what will happen to musicians since they will not be able to profit from copyright due anymore? I would say that you could compare their fate to the fate of musicians before the concept of copyright started to exist; which means looking at music before the introduction of the compact cassette ( whose low copying costs allowed for easier manufacture of copies, which in turn allowed for greater diversity in music): musicians would either attain the status of Enrico Caruso and make their living by selling music copies or would rely on gigs building a more or less devoted following. The main difference between a musician relying on gigs in 1910 and 2010 would be that the musician living in the 2010’s would act at a global scale (in terms of distributing and marketing his music, of setting up a tour, of building a fanbase, etc…) while the musician living in the 1910’s would probably have acted at a local scale.