Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 will mark the beginning of the end of the open source software model we treasure
By Ivan
Panchenko, Co-founder and Deputy CEO of Postgres Professional
As someone involved in the open
source software movement since the beginning, I treasure its ideals and
community spirit. I believe that open source has been instrumental in driving
innovation and enabling more people worldwide to benefit from the computer
revolution. Today, it's clear that change is coming. Some changes may be helpful,
and others won't be. In either case, we need to track what is happening and
ensure that businesses relying on open source understand how the changes will
impact them. Here is what I see happening in 2022.
Open source software was
originally conceived to bring developers together to create great products
faster, with a lower barrier to entry for the users. This model works if there
are enough users, some of whom need to improve the product, some of whom
contribute to it. For popular products, this produces a stable community,
making the product itself more reliable and providing a faster development
cycle.
In most cases, attempts to base a
business on open source by releasing commercial enterprise versions do not
break the open source model. Moreover, such businesses help develop the primary
open source product, providing it with significant software contributions,
solving the problems of enterprise customers.
However, we're seeing a dramatic
shift in where open source revenue is going, as the big cloud providers -
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google - are raking in most of the profits without a
comparable contribution to the open source product or community. If they
contribute, this solves their own problems, not the users' ones. Cloud usage of
the software makes it irrelevant for the users if the source code is open or
not. Since the users cannot contribute, this breaks the open source model.
Also, a cloud provider usually does not respond to the wishes of the users to
improve the product because the provider's interests differ from the user's. So
the open source usage model completely changes and may stop working.
As a result, free and open source
software (FOSS) developers have already started modifying their licenses to
restrict the cloud usage of their products. We expect this tendency to grow.
The developers will also ensure that they receive a fair share of revenue and
that the product receives user contributions. The possible consequences of
this, some of which we will likely see appearing widely in 2022, include more
restricted licenses that may prevent adoption by enterprises or increase costs,
thus making open source a less viable option and slowing adoption. This, in
turn, could cause open source communities around old products with open
licenses to shrink and result in fewer new open source communities getting
started. Sadly, this could significantly impact customers, especially startups
and small businesses, as they see open source products becoming less functional
and more restrictive, with more (and more expensive) forks being developed to
support advanced features, creating confusion among users.
Is this truly the beginning of the
end of open source software? I hope not, but some of these forces may be very
difficult to push back against. We will continue to watch these trends and
report on what we find. Stay tuned.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ivan
Panchenko is the co-founder and deputy CEO of Postgres Professional, the
company that makes PostgreSQL enterprise-ready. A PostgreSQL enthusiast and
well-known member of the PostgreSQL community, Panchenko works closely with
enterprise customers and helps define product strategy. Panchenko is a
professional astrophysicist and a software developer who started developing
PostgreSQL-based applications in 1998.