As open source companies and projects enter a transition phase of funding, licensing, community participation, let’s look at the characteristics of successful open source projects.
SHOW: 834
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #834 Transcript
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WHAT DOES SUCCESS MEAN IN OPEN SOURCE?
- There are 1000s of widely used open source projects, from Linux to Java to MySQL to Docker to Kubernetes to MongoDB
- Less projects are successful from a monetization perspective, but that’s about individual business models
- Plenty of companies during the 2010s-2020s treated open source as “marketing” and not really a development model
WHAT DOES COMMERCIAL SUCCESS LOOK LIKE IN OPEN SOURCE?
- Wide usage infrastructure - Linux, Kubernetes, OpenStack
- Complex projects vs. “it just works”
- Critical security - Vault
- Complex data services - MongoDB, Kafka
- Many companies contributing (share the costs) - Linux, Kubernetes
- Management / Observability Engines - Crossplane, Prometheus
- Programming Languages - Java, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, etc.
- Cloud services hiding complexity
- Cloud services stretching across clouds
- Single vendor projects - often move to non-OSS licensing
- Single vendor projects - difficult to maintain at scale
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