Reply to post: Re: "The journalist largely ignores the many positive comments he got from partners"

Re: "The journalist largely ignores the many positive comments he got from partners"

The open source companies could have been entirely proprietary if they wanted. They chose open source either because a) the initial IP was released by another company, even if the founders were involved it was paid by someone else, and/or b) they knew that adoption depended in part on being free. You can tell this is the case when the open source company, such as Mongo, retains the license rights from outside contributors -- they want to themselves to control the destiny rather than the community. The implicit bargain they are making is "hey devs, adopt our tech for free with no risk to see if it works for you, and later when you go into production make the operations guys pay because we are best placed to support". This bargain assumes they will be the best choice for support, but what if the cloud is a better support option? Yes it breaks the bargain, but it breaks it on both sides. This bargain requires the open source companies to provide better support than the cloud providers. If they flip it to proprietary, there's a different bargain required with the developers as the risk profile changes. It's entirely possible to do that -- look at Snowflake, no open source. Others are making a go at it is Databricks, their cloud implementation is proprietary but they are competing at the operations level, maintaining the open source bargain. These other companies need to decide where they stand and compete at the operations level, otherwise sooner or later the cloud will kill them even if it's not AWS, it will be Google or Microsoft or Alibaba or someone else.