On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company

Re:On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company by zokier on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @04:48PM (#19372856)

> But those days are gone

I have to strongly disagree here. Stuff like Kafka from LinkedIn, Envoy from Lyft, Prometheus from Soundcloud are just the tip of the iceberg of people writing tools because they need them, not because they are in the business of making infrastructure software.

I believe that selling software, be it foss, open core, or fully proprietary is not good business model, neither from business nor from ethics point of view. Sell your expertise or use the software yourself to generate value, but trying to sell it is just futile.

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Re:On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company by smugworth on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @08:47PM (#19374651)

Funny you should mention Kafka. Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede, formerly of LinkedIn who worked on Kafka, left to form Confluent. They provide support, managed cloud, and licenses for their own flavors of Kafka and ecosystem add-ons, and recently made license changes to their open source add-ons to block providers like AWS from offering them as SaaS as well.

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Re:On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company by elcomet on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @02:57AM (#19376344)

I think a lot of successful companies, Microsoft for instance, would disagree with you.

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Re:On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company by zokier on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @04:34AM (#19376788)

Considering the direction Microsoft has taken, I think they in particular would agree. It is no coincidence that MS is more and more straight up giving away their software, or at least bundling it as a service.

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