Whither Open Source? – Techstrong Research Review EP 31

Hi everybody. Mike Rothman here with another edition of the Techstrong Research Review. This is the kind of weekly show.

We try to do it every week, but Mostly weekly, A weekly show where Mitch and I kind of go through whatever's on our mind and give you guys a view of, you know, kind of the internal deliberations and, uh, really research process that we go through, uh, here at Techstrong. So, as always joined by Mitch. Mitch, how are you today?

Uh, good. Other than a little post tra uh, travel, not everything stays in Vegas, by the way. Some things do come with you home, as you can tell from, from this, but I'm doing better.

I'm doing fine. I appreciate that. Yeah, It was just, you know, whether it's a head cold or obviously Mitch, you know, ended up with, uh, testing positive for Covid.

Yeah. Um, yeah. You know, anytime you get a whole mess of people together in the same place, you're going to have things that are communicable and Black hat did not disappoint.

So, I'm glad you're feeling better. I know, uh, you know, Jody, your wife is, uh, a little bit under it. Uh, as of now we're, We're working on it hard.

You know, if you looked at my schedule, you'd say, why did it take you so long to get it again? This is only second time I've had it. Yeah, you're like, as many trips as you've done it, really.

Yeah, that's, that's, I've got a pretty good track record, so yeah. Good, Good, good, good, good, good to see the immune system, you know, kind of kicking in on that. So we probably should talk about some kind of technology topics and say, that's not what we do.

Um, so what, what we thought about this week is, is really just this whole cloud native and open source environment, right? And, and y you know, if you would've asked Alan, you know, six months ago Yeah, tell me about this whole cloud native thing, and he really conflated it with open source, right? It's open source is driving a lot of this piece and, and that, you know, things like Kubernetes and Open Telemetry and, um, helm and a variety of other, you know, kind of technologies that drive a lot of the, the platform and the foundation for how we're building up applications.

But it seems that that is changing, right? You know, you have a couple of news pegs, Mitch, that, you know, kind of really bring up the discussion of what is the future of open source, right? I mean, it's always gonna be an area of innovation.

I think it's an interesting business model, but at some point, does that kind of get a little bit tired and organizations say, we wanna make this a little bit more commercial in nature. So why don't you give everybody a, a, a little overview of, you know, a couple of announcements that, that, uh, red Hat and, and Hashi made fairly recently. Yeah, Absolutely.

Well, red Hat, a couple years ago, sort of send a shock shockwave to people about Red Hat, red Hat Enterprise Limit Linux and stepping away from CentOS and it just being the experi experimental version of it. So that's rather than the tried, trusted, true what you should be running if you're not running Red Hat. So that sent a bit of shockwaves, people never expected that, right?

Like, Hmm, okay, interesting. Well, red Hat then announced they were moving to a business software license. In other words, a non-open source compliant license, which means they can, they can define what they want in the license, um, and doesn't have all the parameters around what it means to be open and re you know, limited or no restrictions on which you can use it for.

And of course, there's counter reactions to that too. Then since Red Hat made that announcements and, and for whatever their interests were to do it, SUSE stepped up and said, well, we're gonna fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux and we'll support it. And this is mostly to support the, you might say, downstream, some people use the, the word freeloader, people who were taking, you know, this, uh, you know, growing, continued to evolving open source product that was being commercialized and offering as open source, then turning their own product from that, uh, another variant of Linux that was specialized in these areas.

So that, that we had seen, and I, you know, interviewed some people from SUSE about it, and we've written about it and kind of, okay, what does that mean? Well, now we have HashiCorp who's done something similar. I'm not sure if it's the, for the same reasons, but they also announced that they're moving to a B SS L license.

So the vnt and Vault and, um, infrastructures code, and a lot of number of things that, that they of course, are underpinnings of, a lot of our software development now are no longer open source in the traditional open source license, but under A B S L. And what does that mean? So it, it just brings up this, okay, is this two points of interesting move on folks, nothing to see here, or is this the start of a new wave of, okay, we'll go open source to a point, but if it becomes more in our interest not to be open source, we will make the shift and take whatever consequences if they're significant or enough or not, of the reaction of the open source community to say blah, you know, play plague on you for doing that.

Right, right. We'll see, we haven't seen that strong of a reaction, at least I don't think. But you know, is this gonna ha are we gonna see this kind of starting to roll up and catch momentum or no, just in, in a few cases it's gonna happen here or there.

Y y you know, I, I, I think we need to separate out, right, you know, kind of the whole business aspect of things and, and how customers do business with some of these companies and the protection of your intellectual property, right? Because I remember back, and this was a long time ago, and you'll remember this because you were still still secure. So I'm, I'm going to date both of us at this point.

Um, you, you know, carbon dating, it may require carbon data at this point. Um, but when Tenable decided to change the licensing around ness, it had always been open source, right? And, and you know, at some point they changed it to a commercial license that would require licensing in order to fork it, build on it, you know, leverage it within products.

And that was less about business terms and trying to make money off of it, although obviously they wanted to do that, and eventually they did and became very successful. That was more about they saw folks taking the base code, basically building it into their products, commercializing it, and you, you know, kind of kick starting and, and really removing a lot of the barriers to entry for, uh, other folks to get into a business to actually compete with them. So they're like, ah, we're not doing this anymore.

And people were p****d, right? I mean, people were p****d when, when Nessus decided to, you know, kind of remove the open source aspect of that. And I remember sitting with ula, you know, back in the day and Jack and, and you know, kind of working out tactics to, to deal with, you know, kind of the inevitable backlash.

And I get the sense that this was the same kind of thing, right? Red Hat, you know, did that for, for that reason. I think HashiCorp looks at that and says, yeah, you know, there are folks that are starting to build, you know, certainly Terraform, you know, underlying a whole variety of different things.

And that ends up at, you know, okay, ultimately now I'm a public company. I'm a big company, I really need to protect my assets. And a lot of my asset is that intellectual property.

So a a all those things to my knowledge are still available under a freemium, you know, type of license. So it's not like they're trying to extract money from every organization that uses it. Obviously, if you use in production, obviously if you use it at scale, you know you're gonna want to pay.

And I think that's reasonable. To me, it's much more about, you know, kind of what is the intellectual property aspect, uh, of this. And, and that's where folks get, you know, kind of pissy about, well, you know, is it not gonna be free?

Are they gonna try to jack me up? It's like, no, you know, they're just, you know, they've invested, you know, hundreds of millions in developing these technologies and you know, far be it from them to actually protect it. Um, so I guess that that's my initial read at it.

I mean, you know, agree, disagree, I mean, Well, I, I lived through that same period. I was one of those freeloaders, In fact, you were Ron and, uh, Marty Software in our products, and it's, I think it's one of those, well, the license of it, the open source license of it is one of the things that made it so widely accessible and appealing and all those kind of things. So it's a part of the success, but then conditions change.

We built the company around it. Do we want people freeloaders to come in and use our stuff and benefit from our hard work licenses? You can do that.

I mean, that's what it allows you to do, uh, allows others to do. Well, we still want the open source license, but we, we wanna curb some of that. And, you know, that's what Tenable did by basically making delaying the, uh, the issuance of the SI signatures updates.

And that's what you paid for subscription to that, right? So they figured out a way of, you know, starting to do that. Yeah, I, Marty did kind of something similar with Snort, and I think we we're at that point again, on a much larger scale.

Um, now with, uh, some of the products you mentioned Terraform too, um, with HashiCorp and Red Hat and Enterprise Lennox, and it, it is, it's always about business drivers. You know, whether the interests of the people who primarily control this, and are you gonna be a SUSE who says, we will always be open source, this is what we are, it's in our D n A, it's in our blood, it's blah, blah, blah, blah. Which, you know, I believe them, there may be a day when it isn't, you know, things can change.

Um, or, you know, we do open source because, you know, we support the larger community. It works with our business model. It's not so much taking, it's not taking away enough business for us to matter about it.

Um, so it's, it's, I think we're past the, I'm angry people are using my s**t to, I, I think it's in my own interest in financial interest not to do it the open source way anymore. Right? Right.

And, and you know, you have different categories of technologies, right? I mean, y you know, certainly a lot of what Hashi is doing and, and Red Hat enter Pros, Lytics and evenness back at the point. I mean, those are foundational kind of building blocks.

You, you know, for a certain technology or, or a certain type of category of product. You know, you get, and SUSE has a bunch of that, you know, kind of as well. But, you know, then you start looking at the surrounding stuff and, you know, open source may be okay because folks aren't building, you know, again, companies on top of, you know, that kind of foundation.

So again, you, you, you know, there are a lot of different ways to build companies. There are a lot of different ways to deliver, you know, value to customers. Uh, but, but I do think, you know, kind of a general religious adherence to the idea that, you know, what's open source and always needs to be open source doesn't factor in business realities.

And we're gonna continue to see that you, you know, over and over. It's like, open source is great and, and it really is one of the great ways to kickstart a, a, you know, set of technologies gain adoption much faster than you would be able to in any kind of pure commercial, uh, type of environment. But, and again, business things change and I think that, that, that needs to be okay, but one question becomes, you know, a number of these projects end up getting, you know, subsumed into C N C F, right?

So what ends up happening at that point, right? I mean, is is that a, that's a one way door, right? Once those projects go in there, there's nothing else.

But, you know, do they become less relevant over time? Do they, when they graduate? So what, what, what do you get a sense of of, you know, kind of the impact on, you know, kind of more of the public projects and, and that approach to, you know, driving technology adoption?

Well, the, the interesting about the Linux thing, Linux Foundation is it's become kind of an engine for open source projects, and most of 'em are, are loosey goosey, right? Mitch and Mike have their in their open source project. And this week we're gonna, we work on features and the next release, we'll work on security patches or whatever, you know, that's just our thing.

And we kind of listen to, to whoever the community is and, you know, accept their changes, et cetera, links, foundation and C N C F and the, the organizations underneath it provides structure to that, you know, place where things go, a process for governance, making sure you've got all the things kind of set up in, in some kind of trustable by the enterprise structure and process. So I think it brings legis the legitimacy to it. It's also a way of starting to subsume open source projects or there's multiple paths.

Uh, let's, let's try to get this, uh, even more accelerated path, and it's already on, this is similar. Let's bring it in, let, then we'll see how we might merge it with another open source project, open Telemetries to get great and open tracing. Yeah.

Great examples of that where, okay, great, here's, here's a process for how we bring this together. So it's, it's structure and organization and process that can help open source, but not everything goes Linux Foundation. And that's, that's good too.

That's right. And, and one, one thing that just occurred to me, right? I I, I think a lot of it also has to do with the company that's originating the technology.

Mm-hmm. Right? So you say Google and obviously Kubernetes is the biggest, you know, kind of example of that.

They don't really have a big interest in commercializing you, you know, that it was a means to an end. They had to build it in order to drive, you know, kind of their own stuff. And then you, you know, they kind of let it loose in the world and, and do other things.

I mean, I think a lot of technology, especially cloud related technology that, uh, Netflix had originated, again, that's not their business, their businesses in serving movies, right? They just had to build some technology in order to do that. Uh, you know, in in, in a more reliable and, and scalable fashion.

A lot Of that lift, another number of companies have done that and then turn those projects over to, you know, Linux Foundation or That's right. That, that's right. So, so again, I think you do have nuance there relative to what is the main business of the folks that are originating the technology as well.

But, you know, suffice it to say, as with everything, it's gonna change and it's gonna evolve, right? And, and you, you know, it's very, very rare that you see, you know, kind of one specific business model, never changing, never evolving, um, you know, always static, right? That's just not the world we live in.

That's just not the way technology markets really work. So again, to kind of have a very rigid philosophical bent about, you know, kind of this, I'm only gonna do stuff with this specific license or, you know, that specific business model, I don't think that reflects reality, uh, for the most part. So I think it really is about, you know, kind of being flexible and trying to figure out what makes the most sense for the business problem you are trying to solve as a consumer of these technologies.

And if it doesn't work, you know, the good news is odds are there are probably another three or four things you can play around with because, uh, you never have just one of something, right? You know, kind of, you always have multiples. So there are typically options for anything that you wanted to Do.

I think there's also a tipping point. You're in a much different place if you have so much revenue from an enterprise customers that if you cut off this path, because people get up, some portion of 'em get upset, okay, I can, I can survive with that. If you're three, three years into your startup and we're gonna swing from, you know, we do everything open source to, we're gonna keep most of it to ourselves, and you have to pay to get the good stuff, you'll lose a lot of people and you may not survive.

So it's luxury of having a lot of revenue in customers gives you far more options to do that kind of thing. And, and, and also remember, I think a lot of the business cycle, you know, kind of also reflects those decisions when there's a period of time when it's really about user adoption eyeballs or registered users or whatever it is, then you do certain things in your businesses reflect that now shockingly enough, you gotta make enough cash to pay your bills at the end of the day, right? You know, kind of the free money era, cash flow over, you know, for, for now.

So you have organizations sitting there going, all right, y you know, it's, it's less about how many eyeballs, right? Less about, you know, how many, you know, kind of active users per month and more about how much revenue am I generating per user, right? And is that, and as those metrics start to change as the businesses start to really focus on different stuff, obviously, you know, kind of how they do business and, and what they do with their technologies are going to reflect that as well, right?

You know, do you wanna have, you know, 50 million, you know, kind of active monthly users, or do you wanna generate, you know, 10, 15 million, you know, to the bottom line and profit per month, right? And again, those are totally legitimate business decisions that you have to make, but uh, they, they do tend to be somewhat mutually exclusive. Good point.

Very interesting topic. And it will continue to change. It will see what happens.

It'll, It will. So, good. Boy, anything else, Mitch, you know, up in your crop?

You know, we got a couple things coming with, you know, observability and, and monitoring. So we've got some research going there, obviously always, you know, some, some AI stuff that we have, uh, going on, uh, as well. I, I know Anything without ai, By the time everybody sees this, you, you know, you'll be knee deep in, in a little bit of a, a, a hackathon that we have going on next As well.

Yeah, we are a, uh, well, we're, um, we're have holding a hackathon in, in, in, uh, Boca, you wanna say Boulder in Boca next week. Uh, focus around ai, some of the early leaders in, uh, DevOps who helped to get DevOps going, some of the thought leadership practitioners, you know, authors, all that kind of thing, people who still write code. Uh, I'm meeting up about 17 of us in, in, and I wasn't one of the originators, but I will be there, uh, a part of the hackathon supporting it as well, really seeing what, what can we do with ai?

What interesting things might we do with AI? And, and probably mostly in the realm of how it helps us build software or the kind of software that we might create. So it's one of those you go into it with, you know, it isn't a, we need to get the project done by Friday and here's the eight things that has to happen.

It's more of the, let's see what we can do and we'll all probably be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. 'cause we didn't expect exactly that to happen or maybe that to happen at all. So that's the fun and interesting part of this.

And, and I know a number of folks, but there's a lot of other folks that I've heard and read and, you know, listened to videos I've never met. So it's great. It's great for me.

I get to meet a lot of people I've not met before too, so, you know, I just have to be careful not to, uh, be too big of a fan boy. Yeah, yeah. And, Uh, we're working alongside folks.

No, but that's an exciting part, right? And, and, and it really reflects where we are in the cycle around ai, right? You know, yes, there are a couple of very visible, very helpful concepts that people are, are starting to use, but there's still so much more in terms of what is this gonna look like?

How's it going to shake out, what's really the value propositions and, and ultimately, uh, kind of what, uh, is gonna be delivered right to customers. And I think there's just gonna be a whole bunch of brainstorming innovation. It'll be really interesting to see what comes out of the, uh, what comes out of the hackathon after next week.

So we'll be able to, you know, take a little bit of time next week and, and, and kind of dig into that a little bit. And we are documenting it too. So there'll be some videos produced coming out of this, of what happened in, in real time there.

Alright, good stuff. So with that, we will see everybody next week, you know, for another addition of the Techstrong research review. So in the meantime, Mitch, feel better.

Make sure thank you much, feeling better on your end and we will see everybody next week. Alright, see you all soon.