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Is Open Source Innovation Now All About Vendor On-Ramps? (infoworld.com)
InfoWorld published an interesting essay from Matt Asay, former COO at Canonical (and an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative), about innovation from the big public cloud vendors, which "even when open-sourced, doesn't really help the community at large... All this innovation is available to buy; none of it is available to build. Not for mere mortals, anyway."
Google in particular has figured out how to both open-source code in a useful way and make it pay. As Server Density CEO David Mytton has underlined, Google hopes to "standardize machine learning on a single framework and API," namely TensorFlow, then supplement it "with a service that can [manage] it all for you more efficiently and with less operational overhead," namely Google Cloud. By open-sourcing TensorFlow and backing it with machine-learning-heavy Google Cloud, Google has open-sourced a great on-ramp to future revenue.
My question: why not do this with the rest of its code? The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work." That is, Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman Google infrastructure. This is the trick that AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out today. Not open source, per se, because that's the easy table stakes. No, the AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud trio are figuring out how to turn their innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services. Companies used to lock up their code to sell it. Today, it's the opposite: They need to open it up to make their ability to operate the code at scale more valuable. For them.
My question: why not do this with the rest of its code? The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work." That is, Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman Google infrastructure. This is the trick that AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out today. Not open source, per se, because that's the easy table stakes. No, the AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud trio are figuring out how to turn their innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services. Companies used to lock up their code to sell it. Today, it's the opposite: They need to open it up to make their ability to operate the code at scale more valuable. For them.
Exactly this!
Free Software was envisioned to open the code, not deny businesses the chance to profit. Open Source TensorFlow and commercial Google Cloud space is a great example of how to do it. Sharing the code isn't primarily about being able to build a competing service, its not about "benefiting the community" (that's a nice side effect in many cases), at its core, its the simple argument that if I use your code, I should be able to look at the code and modify it if necessary.
Besides, TensorFlow is a huge benefit to the community. I may not be able to pay for my own competing Google Cloud, but not every TensorFlow project requires Google Cloud. One can build extremely useful tools and services on a local cluster of physical or virtual machines. There are successful internal corporate projects being built in-house with TensorFlow. Companies are creating new products and services with TensorFlow (and no Cloud), any creative developer could easily build a working proof-of-concept without going to the cloud... they could even be inspired to create new code to improve TensorFlow.
THAT is what Free Software is all about, Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey