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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.
The author offers the fact that Google open sources some of its software to profit off of the support it provides in a tone that suggests this is a problem. This is one of those everybody wins scenarios which Richard Stallman dreamed about when he invented the GPL. Can anyone explain to me what reason the author has to be upset other than "someone other than me is making money"?
It's fear-mongering. We should be applauding every time any commercial company open sources something. FFS, I remember when it was an serious philosophical fight to even mention open source in a business for use, let alone broaching the idea of open sourcing any intellectual property. We should be dancing in the street that Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. are opening up their code. At the same time, open source solutions like Elasticsearch, Hadoop, etc.are doing for "No SQL and Big Data open source" what Apache did for "web server open source", or mysql did for 'rdbms open source'. Or what Docker is doing for "Microservice open source"
The world is consuming open source at a scale we didn't expect at the turn of the century. Hell, if nothing else, it has proven that ESR's "Cathedral and Bazaar" was far more prophetic than anyone imagined.
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
The shift is due to its sucess.
Early open source apps were small tools that scratch an itch. A better text editor, a compiler. A port of a well speced out application.
These things were made by people who had enough time and the development process was simple enough to not care about charging for their work. It was a fun hobby.
Then open source caught on and now we want more complex apps open source. This is good but it needs to get funded somehow.
I would love to write programs for all to enjoy without having to break their bank. But I also want to live a comfortable middle class lifestyle.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work."
No, it's because this is by design. They open source enough to improve image and maybe help get started, but keep closed anything that they think is fundamental to their strategy. This is not just google. Among the known cloud vendors, not *one* open sources any of their backend software. They all have something home grown. They have plenty of open source libraries to act as a client to their back end software, but software that is useless for interoperabilty between vendors or building your competing system. They also enjoy posting articles that *claim* to tell you how they do things, but proceed to omit any actionable details and lay on the buzzwords thick instead. Those articles are crafted to make it sound *really* hard and that they are so clever, but without actually reveling their hand or helping anyone in the slightest. They seem designed to make people feel intimated at the prospect of managing their own infrastructure by making the task seem far more exotic and arcane than it is.
It's not just cloud vendors. There are many electronic devices with open source libraries, but they only work with the respective closed firmware implementations.
I'd say broadly a transformation in standards and open source has happened in the last 15 years or so. In the late 90s you had this overwhelming emergence of standardization and openness in the industry. AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy et al gave way to the federated internet, IETF had a great body of standards and looking at the authors of the standards, they almost always including 'customers' alongside vendors. Linux began overwhelming the Unix market, and this inspired a lot of exploration of open source software. Over the past 15 years, people are locking away a lot of their infrastructure in distinct proprietary cloud providers. The web is more and more about helping people access the social network of the day, none of which are the least bit federated (discarding net neutrality will further reinforce this). You look at 'standards' and the authors are pretty much *always* on the vendor side now, and strangely these 'standards' don't facilitate interoperabilty, but give the vendors a way to claim they are using an industry standard without actually doing anything that would help in the way a standard should.
In short, standards, open source, and the internet all blindsided the vendors when it first took hold of the industry. Over time, the vendors have mastered the art of manipulating those things to their benefit, to let people *feel* like they are continuing the great open revolution, all while the gardens are being walled and the customers are getting locked into their vendors by using the newest 'standard' to interact with product.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.